by Mischka's War- A Story of Survival from War-Torn Europe to New York (epub)
Misha’s musing on VEF is among the longest he wrote on any subject. Perhaps that was partly to make me—a Soviet historian, but ignorant of factory life—understand what Soviet management meant in practice, but it also reflected his attachment to the place. At VEF, Misha found that, as in the halcyon days of the German gymnasium under Herr Knupfer, people not only appreciated his talents but also let him do things his own way. In the newly Soviet factory, as in the German gymnasium, that meant wandering around to see what was happening in the various parts of the enterprise and staying to watch if there was something to learn:
After having been there a few months I began my investigations of that place. I went into one of the two Electrical Productions Buildings, entered some floor, and looked it over; depending on the subject I lingered more or less long times, watching what took place, how the workers acted, what the machines were doing, etc. These excursions, hence my absences from my official work place, lasted different amounts of time; I do not think less than one hour, but also not more than three. It never occurred to me to ask, it also never occurred to me to be surprised that nobody asked me about my absences—correction: I remember that once the immediate boss, Harjess, enquired, what I had seen, and I told him about it; with no further comment by Harjess. At any rate, when I was supposed to build a new design of an amplifier from scratch, I knew where to go.
His move to the design lab to work on the development of audio amplifiers came in December 1940. Only later on, when he wanted to enter university and the factory was unexpectedly uncooperative about letting him go, did it strike him that his bosses’ tolerance of his wandering habits (under both Soviet and German occupations!) probably meant that they had marked him down as a bright lad and were grooming him for higher things.
Apart from VEF, what most preoccupied Misha during Riga’s first Soviet year was his social and particularly his romantic life. I put a lot of effort into working out exactly who and what is being talked about in his diary entries on the topic, which are often elliptical, replete with some heavy crossings-out, pangs of conscience and a lot of abstract discussion of the nature of love. In the process I was guiltily reminded of my own distress as a child when the man next door discovered my diary hidden in the hedge and politely returned it to me (he could have read about my schoolgirl crushes!). So in the end I decided to skip the detail, since the people in question are mainly unknown anyway, and just offer Misha’s retrospective summary from a diary entry for 5 May 1945, written in hospital in Germany just before the end of the war. It was a time when the Soviets had reoccupied and re-annexed Latvia, meaning that for those who, like the Danoses, had left, there was no way back. In this entry, he was looking back on a lost past whose fragments war had scattered to the winds:
It [his first relationship with a girl] began in spring of 1940; the parting came in spring 1941; however, it continued on for a while, and then in the spring of 1942 AK gradually entered the scene, which then in this way anyway gave the waning relationship a new twist. Then AK. It began in spring 1942 and went on with various struggles up to the summer of 1944, when the impact relatively quickly faded.
AK is Austra Krumins, the most important girlfriend of the Riga years according to Arpad Jr’s later memory; she was a Latvian, met at university, who remained in Latvia. This last characteristic was not all that common among the friends of Misha’s Riga years, or at least the ones whose contacts with him have left records. Take Valka, the Russian diminutive by which Waldtraut Hernberger, probably of mixed Russian and German origin, was known to Misha in Riga. She remembered pleasant winter evenings when the two of them strolled beside the river, having ‘deep conversations about religion and such like’, after which, ‘frozen with rather mauve noses’, they would retreat to her place to have tea with jam. Valka went to Germany sometime at the beginning of the 1940s and spent the war in Berlin; her sister had married a man who took her to England, while her mother was arrested and deported by the Soviets in 1941 and spent the war in the Soviet Union. After the war, Valka, along with her sister (now probably divorced) and her mother (finally released from Soviet exile), settled in Canada.
Or take the Klumbergs: Arvid (Didi) was Misha’s best friend from the German school, and his sister Elena, known as ‘Baby’, was two years older than Misha and a classmate of Valka’s at the German gymnasium. The father of the Klumberg family was a successful Baltic German lawyer who had married a Russian woman while working in Moscow; German and Russian were both spoken at home, and the boys were brought up as Lutheran and the girls Orthodox. Misha visited them several times at their summer place in Baldone, south of Riga, in 1940. Baby’s family was so cosmopolitan and wealthy that they had sent her for a year at the end of the 1930s to a finishing school in Switzerland, where she learnt French and also picked up some English. They had a bad time under the Soviet occupation, when the Russians regarded her father as a ‘big capitalist’ and expropriated most of his assets, even nationalising their house and making the family pay rent. Baby, Didi and their mother moved to Germany in 1941 (the parents were divorced by this time), and Didi later fought in the German Army as an officer, on the Eastern Front. Baby herself shuttled back and forth between Riga and Berlin in the early war years, working in Riga for a German businessman, a Nazi who played Hitler’s speeches on the radio to the girls in his office, but was congenial. Later in the war, she moved south in Germany, ending up at war’s end in the US zone, where she married an American GI and moved to Chicago. Didi, who ended the war as a German prisoner, studied architecture in Germany as a postwar DP and then moved to Bolivia, following his remarried father, who had business interests there.
There is a lot about Baby in Misha’s diary, including a worried discussion about why ‘people’ (evidently Baby) thought of him as ‘a cold, dry, calculating machine’. I had Baby pegged as the leading candidate for the unnamed 1940–41 girlfriend, but this was strongly denied by Mrs Helen Machen, aka Baby Klumberg, when I interviewed her in Chicago in 2007. Misha was very nice, kind and polite, she said, but there was ‘no funny business between us, no mushiness’. Well, who knows.
Olga Danos wasn’t in Klumberg’s league as a businesswoman, but she was still, from the Soviet point of view, a capitalist, which was a source of possible danger during the Soviet occupation. The last prewar years had been difficult for a business aimed at the high-end market, since international tensions discouraged luxury consumption. Olga had to retool for a new ‘era of frugality’, as announced by President Ulmanis, but she did so with panache. The President himself attended a ‘frugality’ fashion show in the spring of 1940 in which Olga’s light-coloured summer dress, made of a new and inexpensive ‘amber fabric’, earned his particular commendation. During the Soviet occupation, Olga was penalised, along with many other capitalist business owners, for ‘speculative raising of prices and other violations’, and threatened with closure, although it is not clear if her atelier was actually closed down.
Tensions were mounting in the spring of 1941, both internally and on the international scene. Rumours that Germany was planning an attack on the Soviet Union flew around in diplomatic circles, and despite desperate Soviet efforts to conciliate the Germans, it appeared ever more likely that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact would break down. In that case, of course, Latvia and the other Baltic states were right in the firing line.
On the night of 14–15 June 1941, the Soviets unleashed an unprecedented wave of terror on the Baltic states, arresting and deporting more than fifteen thousand people, or over 1 per cent of the total population, from Latvia. This operation was well prepared, according to the archival record, and not random, specifically targeting particular social and political categories regarded as dangerous (businessmen, army officers, landowners, police etc.). But the secret had been well kept, and it came as a total shock to the population. In Riga, there ‘had been no signs, no rumors, no nothing, indicating the knowledge, suspicion, fear, on anybody’s part of the impending “doom”’, Mi
sha recalled.
At that time I was working at VEF; starting time—generally obeyed!—was 7:30. I left the house around 7; overcast, grey, morning light, the street emptier than usual, deserted, except for now and then a group of people walking together, silent; impression surrealistic, weird, at the lab, collaborators [i.e. workmates] dazed, one missing, the others saying, quietly, this or that acquaintance or relative taken during the night, standing around, no work done.
Naturally, being Misha, he tried to work out what this was all about, attempting a quantitative method:
I began, without a conscious decision, to gather statistics, of who it was who had been taken. In a few days I started to tally it more consciously, after the first data, stories, did not reveal any logic, made no sense: no pattern had emerged. The distribution seemed fully random. I had expected that there would emerge a preponderance of ‘the privileged classes’ in the deportee population. Instead, the distribution seemed, and remained so, to really be random; there were more workers than doctors, etc.; sometimes the whole family was taken, sometimes only one or two members, and even being [a] party member seemed to make no difference: the representation in the deportees represented as cleanly as I could see the composition of the population at large: no preponderance of bosses, or members of former privileged classes, or party members, or anything. Democratic to the hilt.
This is not what the official record (now released from the archives) suggests, but Misha may well have been right. Historians should never be too trusting of bureaucratic documents, which in general tend to say that what happened was what was supposed to happen, but in this case there is an additional reason for scepticism, in that the key document setting out the arrests and deportations of target groups is either misdated or else claims as accomplished fact something that had not yet occurred. In any case, Misha was not alone in perceiving it as a bolt from the blue, hitting random victims. According to a recent Latvian history, the deportations ‘created such fear and hatred in the populace that in a very short period the common view of Germans (“the black knights”) as the Latvians’ primary enemies—developed over the centuries— was suddenly replaced by the view that the primary enemy was Russia and the Communists’.
Nobody from the Danos family was taken on 14–15 June, although they very easily could have been, either on a random basis or, if we give the Soviets more credit for precision, because of Olga’s ‘capitalist’ activities. According to Misha’s musing, presumably based on contemporary rumour, ‘the arrests of that memorable night was the first installment; our family, complete, was on the list for the second wave, which never took place, having been preempted by the outbreak of the war on the Eastern front’. But already, a month or so earlier than the mass arrests, the family had lost two of its members to Soviet terror.
Ariadna Sakss, daughter of Olga’s sister Mary, the wild ‘gypsy’ one in Jan’s recollection, had just married a Danish sailor in an attempt to get out of the country. Misha had given the bride away, which in the Latvian version of the marriage ceremony involves holding a gold crown—very heavy, as he remembered—over the bride’s head as the priest performs the rite. The departure plan backfired: not only was Ariadna unable to leave for Scandinavia, but she, and for good measure her sister Jogita as well, was also arrested for treason and then deported into the interior of the Soviet Union. Misha never saw either of them again. Jogita was to die during the war as a deportee in Krasnoiarsk in Siberia. Ariadna, who was twenty-two when she was arrested, survived fifteen years’ exile in either Ufa in Bashkiria (now Bashkortostan) or Vorkuta in the far north, returning to Riga with three young children and shattered health in 1956.
The cousins’ arrest and disappearance were the first of a sequence of personal wartime disasters that Misha in later life would occasionally recall without commenting on his own reactions. The way he told the story, you could get hit from every side, Soviet, German or whatever. Getting hit was mainly a random outcome, but there were some strategies for self-protection (young Ariadna, with her tousled brown curls and challenging eyes, had not had the time or inclination to learn these). When there was danger around, you had to go on ‘autopilot’, a favourite word of his, and make yourself as still and unnoticeable as possible, all the while looking for a chance to melt away from the scene of danger. (I actually saw him do this twice in the 1990s, once in a threatened mugging by black teenagers in Washington and the other time in an actual mugging in Moscow, and was astonished to see how this worked. It was as if he had made himself invisible in plain sight, becoming an object that gave out no signals to the aggressors, until the moment came to make a dash for it.)
Still, while the dangers came from every side in Misha’s narrative, the Soviet danger was particularly acute and unpleasant. He and Olga probably revised their view of the Soviet Union in 1940–41 along with the rest of the population. Before 1939, there is no sign of particular antipathy in the Danos family to the Russians or even the Soviets. Admittedly the teenage Misha was a Germanophile with little apparent interest in Russia, though he knew the language for everyday purposes. But Olga’s early orientation was more Russian than German, and she saw something of the Bolshevik Revolution at firsthand without demonising it. Arpad Sr, similarly, had good Russian and had tried to build a business on the basis of trade with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and early ‘30s, which suggests that he probably had contacts and spent time there. Somebody in the family, or close to it, even produced a whole novel in Russian about a foreign specialist working in the Soviet Union, written in the spirit of critical sympathy with ‘the Soviet experiment’ common on the moderate international Left in the mid 1930s (the typescript, without a title page, was in the box of Olga’s papers; nobody in the family knows anything about its provenance).
Yet in 1941, when the Germans came in, it never crossed the mind of anybody in the Danos family to remove themselves eastward to escape them, though some Jewish neighbours did exactly that and survived the war as evacuees in the Soviet Union. The Danoses took it for granted that if they moved, it would be westward. In 1944, with the Soviets likely to reoccupy the Baltic states, Olga, Arpad Jr and Jan were agreed that they should try to leave at any cost to avoid living under Soviet rule again. Misha had already left, though for different reasons, but his attitude to the Soviets at this point was probably similar to theirs. Arpad Sr must have seen things a bit differently, since he did not try to leave: we have no full insight into his reasons, but Misha quoted him as saying that he had been a displaced person once in his life already, during the First World War, and did not choose to repeat the experience.
By the late 1940s, both Misha and Olga saw the Soviets as enemy No. 1, which they, but unfortunately not Arpad Jr and Jan, had managed to escape. This was a view common to most DPs in Europe, particularly those from the Baltic states; Misha and Olga were unusual only in not taking on the aggressive Latvian nationalism that often went with it. When they moved to the United States, it was at the height of the Cold War, with European DPs firmly categorised as victims of Communism. Neither of them left any comment on American political attitudes at this period; no doubt they were still trying to get a handle on them. In the 1950s, judging by her diary entries, Olga had fully internalised a Cold War attitude to Communism, lamenting the fate of her two sons left trapped inside the Soviet Union, ‘suffering in Russia’ and ‘pursued by hunger and cold’.
From his firsthand encounters and later DP conditioning, Misha emerged with an Orwellian view of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian society, pathologically deformed by doubletalk, curdled idealism and violence, in which fear was the dominant emotion. To be sure, his professional contacts with Soviet physicists and visits to the country, starting in the late 1960s, slightly qualified that, but as he told me many times, up until perestroika he always felt a heavy ‘pressure’ on flying into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. There was a certain irony, therefore, in the fact that, in marrying me, he had inadvertently allied himself with one of the main cr
itics of the totalitarian interpretation among professional Sovietologists. Strangely enough, this never caused any problems between us, or even arguments. He was the eyewitness, an unusually accurate and observant one in my judgement; I was the historian, whom he considered to be fair-minded. Mind you, he more or less had to see me like that because it was not in him to be basically critical of a person he loved. I could live with knowing that we had somewhat different views on something, but that wasn’t acceptable to Misha.
I see, re-reading his musings, that Misha didn’t acknowledge that any differences of interpretation of the Soviet Union existed between us. This had the odd consequence that when he changed his mind on something, it couldn’t be because of my influence. For example, Misha wrote a musing in 1994 entitled ‘Everyday in the Soviet Union’ in which he wrote that in the Soviet Union, material shortages of just about everything, from shoes to housing, were more on most people’s minds than fear. In the musing, Misha notes that while his previous view had been that fear was dominant in all strata of society, he had now changed his mind, at least as far as the mass of non-privileged citizens was concerned. Since this is actually the main argument of the book I was then working on, the logical presumption would be that he got the idea from me—but in the musing, he explicitly gives his sources, and I’m not one of them. Yet it occurs to me as I write that there’s also another way of looking at this story, which is that while Misha’s revised conclusion undoubtedly reflected my general line of thought as of 1994, my book wasn’t actually written for another four years, which means that there was also time for his rather clear and concise formulation to come back and influence me.