Stalin's Children

by Owen Matthews

  If Stalin had not died on 5 March 1953 of a brain haemorrhage, my mother’s life would have been very different. The news of the dictator’s death was broken to the children at Saltykovka by the head teacher, near-hysterical with grief, and all the children burst into tears at the news. For many of the orphans, the avuncular, mustachioed great leader was the closest thing they had ever known to a real father. In Moscow, Lenina stood in the two-million-strong crowds at Stalin’s funeral. She, too, wept genuine tears for the passing of Stalin, without ever thinking that this kindly, smiling man was responsible for taking her parents away from her.

  With Stalin gone, Lyudmila’s world tilted on its axis. She graduated from the Saltykovka school top of her class, with a near-perfect grade (she still remembers the mistake that cost her a perfect score: mistakenly putting a comma in the sentence ‘hippopotamuses, and elephants’). Under Stalin, a place at a prestigious university would have been unthinkable for a child of an enemy of the people. Mila would probably have gone to a provincial teachers’ training college, and spent her life as a schoolmistress.

  But now Lenina dared to hope that the stain on her sister’s record could be overlooked. She was now working as a copy editor of doctoral theses at the Institute of Jurisprudence, a job wangled for her by Sasha. Lenina found an acquaintance who knew the Rector of the History faculty of Moscow State University, and arranged a meeting to lobby for Lyudmila’s admission. She was lucky. The man was either simply kindhearted, or bore secret scars of his own from life under Stalin. As Lenina explained what had happened to her and her sister since their parents’ arrest, the man broke down in tears. In September 1953 Lyudmila was admitted to read history at the Soviet Union’s most prestigious university, housed in a vast, newly constructed Stalinist skyscraper on the Lenin Hills – a palace of Socialist learning with all of Moscow spread at its feet. When she heard the news, she says, ‘I grew wings.’

  * * *

  Stalin’s death also brought the hope that their father might be released from the Gulag. In 1954 the MVD, the latest incarnation of the NKVD, broke their seventeen-year silence on the fate of Boris Bibikov. In response to yet another letter from his mother they replied, in terse officialese, that Bibikov, B.L., had died of cancer in 1944 in a prison camp. The next year Sophia wrote a personal plea to Stalin’s successor, the new Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, that at least his name be cleared. The letter was duly entered into her late son’s file.

  ‘Respected Nikita Sergeyevich,’ she wrote. ‘I am turning to you as an old woman, a mother who had three sons, three Communists. Only one is left [Yakov], who serves in the ranks of our glorious Soviet Army. One [Isaac] diedon the front in the Great Patriotic War, defending our Motherland. The other, Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, was arrested in 1937 as an enemy of the people and sentenced to ten years. His term should have expired in 1947.

  ‘Nikita Sergeyevich, my son… I feel, I am sure that Boris was innocent, that there was a mistake. Is it not possible after eighteen years to sort the matter out, and rehabilitate him? I still cannot find the truth, to know, in the end, what happened. I am not a Party member, I am eighty years old, but I honestly raised my children to love their Motherland and to serve her faithfully. They gave her their knowledge, their health, their lives, for the joy of Communism, for peace on earth, so that their great Motherland would prosper… Dear Nikita Sergeyevich, I ask you to look into this matter as a Communist, and if my son is innocent, to rehabilitate him. Respectfully yours, Bibikova.’

  Boris Bibikov’s case was re-opened in 1955, one of the very first wave of the so-called rehabilitation investigations, judicial reviews of the victims of the Purges ordered by Khrushchev in the wake of his ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress. The task of reviewing Bibikov’s case, and thousands like it, was a colossal bureau- cratic undertaking. Detailed depositions were taken from dozens of witnesses who knew Boris Bibikov and the files of everyone involved in his case were closely studied. Ironically, the part of the file covering the rehabilitation investigation was almost three times longer than the spare seventy-nine documents it took to arrest, convict and kill him.

  All those who were questioned about Boris’s supposed counter-revolutionary activities pronounced him a sincere and dedicated Communist.

  ‘I can only describe him positively; he gave himself wholly to the Party and to the life of the factory and had tremendous authority among the workers,’ Ivan Kavitsky, Boris’s deputy at the KhTZ, told the investigators. ‘I know nothing of his anti-Soviet activities – on the contrary, he was a devoted Communist.’

  ‘I never heard of any political deviation on [Bibikov’s] part. People said he had been arrested as an enemy of the people but no one knew why,’ said Lev Veselov, a factory accountant.

  ‘I remember that my comrades in the management expressed surprise when he was arrested,’ said the typist Olga Irzhavskaya.

  On 22 February 1956, a closed session of the Supreme Court of the USSR produced a lengthy report, marked ‘Secret’, formally overturning the decision of the Military Collegium reached on 13 October 1937. A short note was sent to Boris’s family announcing his rehabilitation, along with a death certificate. The ‘cause of death’ clause was left blank.

  University was heaven for Lyudmila. She moved into a hall of residence at Stromynka Street in Sokolniki in north Moscow, where she shared a dormitory with fifteen other girls. In time she moved to her own room in the main university building itself, in its spreading grounds in the Lenin Hills. Her whole childhood had been spent in Soviet institutions, and the crowded social life of the university was a decent substitute for a family. She immediately made lifelong friends among the brightest of her generation. One was Yury Afanasiyev, a stocky, outspoken fellow historian who was to become one of the intellectual leading lights of Perestroika. Another contemporary was a former farm boy from Stavropol with a thick country accent and a total lack of cosmopolitan irony about Soviet life which Mila and her friends were quickly developing. He tried doggedly to court Lenina’s friend, Nadia Mikhailova, who found him insufferably provincial and repeatedly turned him down. His name was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. ‘How can a descendent of a prosperous Moscow merchant marry a Stavropol truck driver?’ Nadia used to joke.

  Lyudmila learned good French and some basic Latin and German, and the art of outward conformity and hard work. Her essays, written in a perfect copperplate hand, are models of thoroughness and diligence. She was a creature of the Soviet system which had brought her up, with its emphasis on hearty communal activity and its complete lack of physical or mental privacy. The student life of the 1950s was filled with semi-voluntary after-class readings of Moliere, nature rambles and amateur dramatics. But despite the constraints of ideology and communal life, Mila felt exhilaratingly free, at last, to explore the foreign and limitless world of literature. She read Dumas and Hugo, Zola and Dostoyevsky, the sentimental outpourings of Alexander Grin and the pastorals of Ivan Bunin. There, in books, music and theatre, she finally found her own private window on to a world big enough for her huge energies.

  Lyudmila was popular. Her passion – or one of her many passions – was ballet. Lenina had introduced her to the Bolshoi theatre after Sasha had insisted that his young sister-in-law be given ‘a start in life’, and they would go as often as they could.

  Lyudmila’s love affair with the great nineteenth-century theatre on Okhotny Ryad burgeoned during her student days. She and her friends would go several times a week to the Bolshoi, applauding wildly from the cheap seats at the end of every act and then keeping a cold vigil on the street outside Door 17 to greet the dancers as they came out with huge bunches of flowers. Valery Golovister, a thin and sensitive young man, the brother of Lyudmila’s best girlfriend, Galya, was her closest male friend. They were both fervent balletomanes. He seemed to have no interest in girls, despite his good looks, but those were innocent times and no one, at least not Lyudmila and her not-very-wo
rldly girlfriends, thought to suspect him of the homosexuality he carefully concealed.

  For Lyudmila and her friends, it was not enough just to seethey had to throw themselves into the performance, to adore the actors and dancers and weep over the libretto. They stood in shifts for tickets to the touring Comédie Française, the first foreign company to play in Moscow since before the war, and went to almost every one of the forty performances of the repertoire, which ranged from Molière’s Tartuffe to Corneille’s Le Cid. They whooped ‘Vive la France!’ from the gallery, and threw flowers every night. Outside the theatre on the last night of the season, they were in the cheering crowd which followed the actors from Theatre Square to the National Hotel. KGB men in the crowd kicked Lyudmila viciously from behind with heavy boots, trying to subdue the girls’ unseemly adulation of the visiting foreigners.

  When Gérard Philippe, the greatest French actor of his generation, came to Moscow the next year for a film festival, Lyudmila’s gang mobbed him. He chatted politely to his Russian fans and promised to return. After Philippe had returned to France, Mila and her friends had a whip-round and collected money for a present for their hero. One of the girls took the train to Palekh, a village famous for its miniatures on lacquer boxes, and commissioned a portrait of Philippe as Julien Sorel in the film Le Rougeet le Noir. When the French Communists Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon visited Moscow a few months later Lyudmila and four of her friends marched into the Hotel Moskva – a bold move, since the place housed foreigners and was crawling with KGB officers – and called Triolet from the lobby, explaining that they had a present they wanted her to take to Gerard Philippe in Paris. Mystified but impressed, Triolet came down to collect it and duly delivered the gift to Philippe when she returned. Madness, unthinkable madness to do such a thing just five years before. But the Khrushchev thaw had changed the rules, and Lyudmila and her friends tested the limits of the new world as far as they dared.

  In L’Humanité, the French-language Communist daily which was the only French paper available to the Soviet public, a friend of Lyudmila’s read that Gérard Philippe was in Peking on a cultural trip. For a lark – a dangerous lark – the girls went to the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street and booked an international phone call to China. They had no idea which hotel he was staying at, so the operator, a young woman who appreciated the audacity of the thing, told her Chinese counterpart to put them through to the biggest hotel in town. Half an hour later, Lyudmila’s friend Olga was talking to Gerard Philippe, who told her he would be stopping over in Moscow on his way back to Paris.

  At Vnukovo Airport the police tried to stop them, but the twenty girls rushed past on to the tarmac and crowded round the steps. Philippe was by then terminally ill with hepatitis picked up in South America. He was ashen and looked far older than his thirty-seven years. He recognized Lyudmila and greeted her warmly. She asked him to sign her copy of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir.

  ’Pour I.yudmila, en souvenir du soleil de Moscou,’ Philippe wrote. It is still on a shelf in my mother’s bedroom.

  Mila graduated from Moscow State University with a Gold Medal, one of the ablest students of her year. On leaving, Lyudmila took the risky option of turning down a universityassigned position and instead looked for a job on her own. She rented a room from a middle-aged couple near Lermontovskaya Metro, where she slept on a camp bed. Her landlord was an aviation engineer, and Lyudmila tutored their son in return for board and lodging. The engineer didn’t have any official work, except for odd jobs among his neighbours, and Lyudmila suspected he was in disgrace of some sort and lying low. The family ekedouta living in the cracks of the Soviet system, where a man without ajob was a non-person with no money, no access to school for his children, to work canteens or holidays. The family lived on carrot and bone soup; Lyudmila would bring sausages when she found them and had time to wait in line.

  Yekaterina Ivanovna Markitan, the wife of an old Party colleague of Boris Bibikov from the Kharkov Tractor Factory days, came from South Russia on a shopping trip and stayed at Lenina’s. She told Luydmila that an old friend was now director of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, dedicated to the study and preservation of the legacy of Communism’s founders. Her name was Yevgeniya Stepanova, and when Mila contacted her she immediately offered Mila a job as a junior researcher. Lyudmila had no great personal enthusiasm for Marxism or Leninism, but the job was in Moscow, and it was intellectual, so she jumped at it. Her work was to help in the giant task of collating and copy-editing the collected works of Karl Marx and his friend and sponsor, Friedrich Engels. She found the voluminous outpourings of the two men tedious. But the Institute had an outstanding library, her job gave her ample opportunity to practise her French, and she found her colleagues intelligent and lively. Foreign Communists and senior academic practitioners of the almost theological science of Communist doctrine would visit often, with Lyudmila being called upon to translate and accompany them. And then there was the excellently stocked staff canteen, on the ground floor of the small neoclassical palace which housed the Institute, which had formerly belonged to the Princess Dolgoruky and served as the headquarters of the Nobles’ Assembly before being put to a more egalitarian use.

  In 1995 I stumbled on the old Institute of Marxism and Leninism by chance. With the demise of the Institute and indeed of Marxism and Leninism in general, the old palace had come down in the world. A group of descendants of Russia’s nobility had somehow managed to reclaim the building, but had no funds to restore it. So it sat mouldering in its overgrown garden, lonely and irrelevant.

  The newly re-formed Nobles’ Assembly threw a fundraising ball in a disused gym which occupied one wing. I went in my father’s old dinner suit, which he had worn when he met Nikita Khrushchev as a young diplomat in 1959. The vestiges of Russia’s noble houses, those who had not emigrated and yet managed to escape the Revolution, the Civil War and the Purges, were out in force, inexpertly dancing as a Russian army band played mazurkas and Viennese waltzes. But the organizers were groping for a past no one remembered, and striving to revive traditions which lived on only in their imaginations. Prince Golitsyn, in grey plastic shoes, chatted to Count Lopukhin, in a worn polyester suit, as their heavily made-up wives fluttered plastic Souvenir of Venice fans.

  The palace had once been magnificent, but decades of aggressive Soviet philistinism had reduced it to a soulless warren of cheap chipboard partitions and corridors lined with curling linoleum. The high, heavy windows overlooking the courtyard had long ago been painted shut. Everything which could be stolen had been, including the door handles and light switches.

  I tried to imagine my mother, young and full of enthusiasm, limping down these corridors for her first job interview with the Institute’s director. Or my mother, defiant and voluble, facing the viciousness of her colleagues at the Party meeting convened to censure her for her romance with a foreigner. But she wasn’t there; I couldn’t feel any ghosts in the place as it reverberated to the oompah music of the dance band.

  By the spring of 1960 Lyudmila had been made a full staff member of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, yet the creaking wheels of the housing bureaucracy turned slowly. She was eligible for her own apartment or, as an unmarried woman, more likely a room in a communal apartment. In March her colleague Klava Konnova, her two children and ageing father, were finally allocated an apartment of their own, and they moved out of a tiny, seven-metre-square room in a kommunalka on Starokonushenny Pereulok, near the Old Arbat. Lyudmila put her name down for it, and moved in. It was tiny, but it was a home. She was twenty-six years old, and for the first time in her life she had a space entirely to call her own.

  8. Mervyn

  In the eyes: dream…

  And all the rest so curtained within itself

  and effaced, as though we could not understand it

  and clouded deep out of its own depths.

  You swiftly fading daguerreotype,

  In my more slowly fading hands.

&
nbsp; Rainer Maria Rilke

  I was always fascinated by my father’s study, on the first floor of the narrow Victorian house in Pimlico where I grew up. It smelled of French cigarettes and Darjeeling tea, and it was filled with the sound of Bach cantatas and Handel operas. Now it seems a small room, but in my mind’s eye it is always enormous, seen from the height of a seven-year-old hovering by my father’s venerable armchair and gazing up at the towering walls of books. The cavalry sword hanging over the mantelpiece and the collection of model steam engines spoke of an unknowable but overpowering masculinity, while the drawers full of telescopes, compasses, family photographs and knick-knacks were a forbidden treasure trove. Even in my mid-teens, as my father and I grew apart, I remained fascinated by his past, which he refused to discuss and the key to which seemed to be inextricably linked to the mystery which was his study.

  Once, when I was about sixteen, I found a packet of photographs of my father while illegally rooting though his desk drawers. The images were not of the father I knew, but a surprisingly cool-looking young man in a sharp sixties suit and Malcolm X-style sunglasses. In one photograph he was strolling along a sunlit seaside promenade. Other photos showed him in a heavy overcoat, standing on the ice of a giant lake; browsing among watermelon stalls in a picturesque marketplace in Central Asia; looking relaxed and confident in a seaside restaurant, surrounded by pretty girls. The photos all had when and where they were taken neatly marked on the back in pencil in his careful hand.

  I asked my father later that day, perhaps seeking to provoke him with a confession of my brazen invasion of his hallowed desk, what he had been doing in Bukhara and Lake Baikal in 1961. He looked away, smiling thinly – his favourite mannerism – and settled into his chair.

  ‘Oh,’ he said noncommittally, as he poured himself tea through a strainer. ‘Baikal? The KGB took me there.’