by Marek Halter
“Are you a member of the Communist Party, Miss Gousseiev?”
“I’ve already answered that question.”
“I’m asking you again. Are you a member of the Communist Party?”
“No, and I never have been.”
“You never have been here in the United States, or in the USSR?”
“Nowhere, neither here nor back there.”
“I don’t suppose you can prove it.”
“You won’t be able to prove the contrary either, sir.”
The head-to-head had gotten off to a good start. Marina didn’t even smile, but I did. She had had some time to prepare. Cohn was using the oldest trick of the trade, tirelessly repeating the same idiotic questions in the hope of exasperating the witness. Some did crack. At the end of their tethers, they let rip when they would have done better to keep quiet. Marina Andreyeva Gousseiev didn’t seem the type to lose patience so easily.
“Yesterday, you told us that the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR, Joseph Stalin, had every means at his disposal to put pressure on you, but you claim you’re not a communist. Isn’t that a bit odd? It could have been a way of protecting yourself.”
This time she smiled.
“You know nothing about our country, sir, and even less about Stalin. In the USSR, being a good communist never protected anybody from anything. Siberia is full of good communists and so are the cemeteries. The Gulag[5] was invented for them. … ”
McCarthy cut in, “Exactly, Miss Gousseiev. You weren’t arrested. You’re very much alive, but if we’re to believe what you say, you’re not a communist. How do you explain this ‘miracle’?”
“Joseph Vissarionovich gave me a chance.”
“A chance? What chance?”
“He gave me the chance to become a Jew.”
McCarthy, Nixon, and Mundt crowed wryly in the same low scornful tone.
“I’m not sure whether I understand you correctly, Miss Goussov,” snorted Nixon. “Would you care to explain?”
Marina darted a glance at the stenotypists, then at me, like an actress gauging her audience before launching into her part. It was impossible to know whether this was a deliberate strategy or a habit left over from her acting days. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help throwing her an encouraging look.
“I’ve already told you. After that night at the Kremlin, I was afraid, all day, every day, for years. And I heard that Uncle Avel, the man who had walked behind Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s coffin, had been shot. Egorova was arrested too. I don’t know what became of her. After her, it was Ordzhonikidze and Bukharin. Allegedly they committed suicide. … I hardly dared leave my room after that because it made coming back even more frightening. I would walk around my apartment block hundreds of times before going in. Once inside, I would stop and listen in the stairwell, not daring to go up. I was starting to go crazy. Out on the street, I couldn’t stand having anyone walking behind me, but everyone was the same. Everyone was scared of the leather coat brigade. Everyone had the jitters. Nobody trusted anyone or anything. … ”
Cohn cut her short with a wave of his hand.
“What is this ‘leather coat brigade’?”
“That’s what we used to call the secret police. Later it rebranded itself the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, but it was the same thing. They would go around in leather coats even in the summer, just like your FBI agents in their trench coats and hats, except that the trench coats and hats make your guys seem a bit softer than ours.”
“Keep your comments to yourself, miss,” muttered Wood. “Carry on.”
“The leather coat brigade would knock at someone’s door, arrest him, and nobody would ever hear of him again. It was impossible to find out whether those arrested were alive or dead. Their wives, mistresses, and children were barred from work. They were kicked out of their lodgings. It was best to stay away from them after that. They had become contagious. You only had to smile at them to catch their disease. More often than not, they would disappear in their turns. Nobody was spared. They arrested Bukharin and Ordzhonikidze, both powerful men whom I had seen joking with Stalin over dinner on November eighth, in 1932. Teachers, doctors, civil servants, writers, and workers would all disappear from one day to the next on accusations of Trotskyism, defeatism, or offenses against Bolshevism. … Sometimes a child would come back from an errand to find his family gone. A word, a sentence, or a joke dating back years could spell the end for you. Sometimes they would arrest all the workers at a factory on the pretext of sabotage. Of the two thousand delegates who attended the seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party in January 1934, one thousand eight hundred were assassinated in the two years that followed. Even Kirov, the powerful mayor of Leningrad who had met with applause on that occasion, was assassinated. Stalin wept over his coffin. Then, at his whim, the NKVD laid into the Red Army. Seventy thousand officers, captains, commanding officers, and generals were exterminated. … We had the worst plague of all eating away at us: fear, white-knuckle fear. The panic went to people’s heads. Some of them couldn’t look at themselves in the mirror anymore. The ones who couldn’t cope killed themselves. Death seemed so serene, or at least it was better than living with the fear. We had lost count of the number of suicides. Every time I heard there’d been another one, I thought of Nadezhda Alliluyeva. But if you didn’t have the courage to take your own life, it was difficult not to turn into a monster. Fear rots your soul. You stop feeling anything else. You find yourself wanting to get into your torturers’ good graces—”
“We get the picture, miss,” Wood cut in. “You’re not answering the question. Why were you spared? Since Stalin picked off all those others, why not you?”
She looked back at him, snapping her mouth shut. Without taking her eyes off Wood, she let the silence in the room deepen. It was a brooding silence, full of shadows where the words she had just uttered continued to lurk.
Cohn stepped in, “Answer the question, please, Miss Gousseiev.”
She completely ignored him, keeping her eyes fastened on Wood. He squirmed in his chair.
This time it was McCarthy who growled, “Are you refusing to answer the question?”
“I am answering the question. I’m not afraid of you, you know. I was afraid all those years, but it’s over now. I’m not frightened of anything anymore. Fear was so much a part of my existence for so long that it no longer has any hold on me. People like you don’t scare me anymore.”
For the first time, Wood looked uneasy for a couple of seconds. He was used to wails, protests, tantrums, and tears, but not this kind of calm.
McCarthy and Nixon were thicker-skinned than he was. Nothing human could make so much as a pinprick in their tough hides.
“No comments, Miss Goussov,” growled McCarthy. “Just answer the question that was put to you.”
“Why should I? You’re not listening to my replies. You want me to give yes or no answers. It’s stupid. Life doesn’t boil down to a series of yes or no answers, or does yours perhaps? It can’t be much fun if it does.”
Shirley stifled a giggle. McCarthy sniggered, tapping on the hefty file in front of him that he had not yet opened.
“I would advise you not to take that tone, miss. It won’t do you any good.”
I was surprised at McCarthy’s composure and began to wonder what he had up his sleeve, but Cohn didn’t let the pace slacken.
“Since you had stopped working for the theater by that point, how did you earn your living?”
“I worked in cinema. There were two big official studios: Gorky Film and Mosfilm. They were always looking for girls to play the minor parts, two or three minutes here and there. Sometimes, I would work on several films in the same week. At other times, I would have nothing for a month. It was okay. Nobody asked me any questions and nobody refused me work. That’s how I met Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler.”
“Could you spell the name for our stenotypists, Miss Gousseiev?”
; She obeyed, turning in our direction. This time she didn’t look far enough to meet my gaze.
“Yakovlevich, is that a Jewish name?” asked Nixon.
She pretended not to hear the question, and so did the others. For once, Cohn looked ill at ease.
“Carry on, Miss Gousseiev.”
“There’s no man on earth like Aleksei. I suppose there’s a chance he’s still alive. In Birobidzhan, I prayed for him. … All the girls were in love with him and so was I. He was the first man I ever loved and he was a great director. He understood that it was killing me not to go back onstage. One night, I told him why I couldn’t go back to the theater. It was the first time I had ever told anyone what had happened at the Kremlin. That was ten years later, when I was nearly thirty. Aleksei tried to convince me that the danger had passed. ‘Stalin has forgotten all about you, Marinotchka. He’s forgotten that you even exist.’ But I was still frightened. Then the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. That was in June 1941. It only took them a few weeks to take the Ukraine, reach Kiev, and surround Leningrad—”
“We know the story, Miss Gousseiev.”
“No, you don’t know at all! You don’t have the slightest idea. You’ve never had millions of German invaders crawling all over your country, destroying everything in their path! You’ve never run down streets with bombs whistling around you and not known where to find cover. … The bombing raids started in July. Nobody was expecting it. In August, the Germans took Kiev. They surrounded Leningrad. There was no question of shooting films. The studios were relocated to Alma-Ata. Aleksei refused to flee. He said, ‘We have to hold out. Bombs and bullets aren’t the only weapons. Theatre is a weapon too. You must go back onstage. It’s your privilege and your duty. We’re going to show these Nazi barbarians that Russian theatre is alive and kicking, Marinotchka. Stalin himself will come and applaud you, you’ll see.’”
Moscow
August 1941–January 1943
MOSCOW WASN’T MOSCOW anymore. In July 1941, the city changed in the course of a single afternoon. Without any kind of warning, German dive-bombers blackened the summer skies like swarms of locusts. The wail of the Stukas tore through the people until late into the night. Bombs ripped houses open and set fire to blocks of apartments. Open-mouthed, wide-eyed, and swallowing dust, everyone was dumbfounded by the horror of it all.
The shells hit the Bolshoi Theatre, Staraya Square, and the huge university buildings on Mokhovaya Street. The Heinkel and Messerschmitt fighters unleashed hell’s fury on the old parts of the city with their wooden houses. The Nazis were hoping such areas would act as the spark that would set the whole city ablaze. When dawn came, acrid plumes of smoke spiraled into the air, blocking out the sun. Fine particles of debris floating in the air settled in thick layers on the pavement.
Since June, it had taken only three short weeks for the fascist mob to occupy Poland and the Ukraine. Now, they were only sixty miles away from Moscow. Endless lines of men formed outside recruitment centers. They all wanted to go to the front. The war had given the downtrodden people of Russia a new lease of life. Their anger was getting the best of their terror. The desire to fight and beat off the invader was putting an end to Stalin’s ten-year reign of humiliation and fear over the USSR. After a long absence, Russian pride was finally stirring in Soviet breasts.
People covered the roofs of their apartment blocks with sandbags to drown out the incendiary rockets. They mounted long-barreled antiaircraft defense cannons on the most spacious terraces. Everyone soon knew how to tell a Heinkel’s roar from a Messerschmitt’s. The whine of the diving Junkers was gut-wrenching. Spewing death, they would skim over the rooftops and strafe avenues, punching holes in the façades, indiscriminately gunning down old and young. The Heinkels would stay at altitude. Their steady low hum would herald the terrifying whistle of the bombs, as if indifferent.
The windows had to be boarded up. The nights were blacked out. During the air raids, many people couldn’t bear to stay in the suffocating heat of the shelters, where the echoed rumblings shot their nerves to pieces. They preferred to be outside helping to put out fires or simply shaking a vengeful fist at the sky.
After wreaking havoc with their surprise tactics, the Germans proved to be sticklers for routine as much as they were for methodology. The bombers would descend on Moscow around ten every night. People were ready for them even before the sirens went off. Mothers would take their children down into the metro stations with a bundle of belongings, a suitcase, and some toys. Some of them would even take a samovar with them. Blankets and rugs were rolled out between the tracks for beds. None of the pandemonium outside could be heard down there. They had to wait for the announcement over the loudspeakers, “The alert is over, comrades and citizens” or sometimes, “The threat has passed, comrades and citizens.”
Then they would go back above ground to find a vast and worried Moscow. Everyone would be looking out for a fire in their street, counting the shadows cast by the façades to make sure that their own apartment block was still standing.
At the beginning of August, the women of Moscow set about digging antitank ditches all around the city. The trench was five hundred miles long. Thousands of tons of earth had been dug out with pickaxes, then shifted with spades and wheelbarrows. They were all there: students, widows, and grandmothers with calloused hands, not to mention the newlyweds who had only spent their wedding nights with their husbands.
A dancing barrage of balloons appeared in the sky. Their forests of steel cables finally put a stop to the deadly strafing of the Stukas. The major avenues were barricaded. Just the trams were running. The only other traffic was the trucks carrying thousands of chevaux-de-frise, whose spikes were soon to block routes in from the West. Lenin’s Mausoleum and the Bolshoi Theatre were covered with gigantic painted tarpaulins to trick the German pilots into thinking they were civilian apartments.
Every night, the blue beams of the searchlights would sweep the dark sky. They would light up clouds or the long underbellies of balloons, or dissolve into the glittering myriad of stars. When the rays of light snagged on the silhouette of aircraft, the antiaircraft defense would fire round after round without stopping. Tracer bullets would streak the night. Thousands of dazzling trails would shoot into infinity. It looked like the work of a deranged child. Fireballs as white and ephemeral as mist would bloom in the night. Purple explosions would signal that the target had been hit. The golden jets of blazing kerosene would tear the wings asunder and rip the fuselages open. Sometimes, you could make out the twirling corolla of parachutes. Up on the rooftops and down in the streets, everyone would whoop for joy.
However, rumors of Wehrmacht victories spread. The lack of information only fueled such talk. Since the first days of the war, it had been against the law to own a radio receiver. Receivers were authorized only in workshops, the metro, and public places. The politruk, political war commissars, monitored their use. Radio broadcasts were more about urging people to be brave, do their duty, and fight than reporting hard facts about battles or the situation on the front lines.
We heard much more about that by word of mouth. Minsk, then Smolensk, and even Kiev had fallen. Leningrad was surrounded. The Wehrmacht pack had entered Odessa and was pushing on toward the Crimea. A wild rumor was whispered from ear to ear: the Germans had taken a million Red Army soldiers prisoner in the vast wheat fields of the Ukraine, and now there was nobody left to harvest.
The tanks were still advancing on Moscow mile by mile. The order was given to evacuate all children under fifteen from the city. Kazansky and Kursky stations were packed with parents at their wits’ end and children in tears. Poorly adapted cargo trains were to carry the youngsters off to the Urals, Siberia, or the Caspian Sea. Moscow suddenly seemed even bigger and gloomier.
For years, like most Muscovites, Marina had rented a room in a communal apartment known as a kommunalka. In its day, the apartment block on Protopopovsky Boulevard near the Botanical Gardens had been the epitome of
bourgeois comfort. Its vast lounges had since been sliced up into rooms of one hundred square feet. For three years, Marina had been lucky enough to have a room of her own, a real luxury. In the middle of the night on August 31, 1941, a bomb had hit the side of the apartment block, destroying the top three floors. After the alert had been called off, the façade collapsed. Somebody hadn’t turned the gas off properly and the pipe had exploded. It took until dawn to put out the fire.
Marina’s few belongings went up in flames. All that remained of her room was a few reddish-brown spirals of pungent smoke. At first light, women began rooting through the cinders and debris. In their rage, they found the strength to lift boulders of rubble as if they were wisps of straw. They no longer felt their burned hands. Their grimy cheeks were streaked with tears. The light had gone from their eyes in their gray faces.
Marina didn’t feel like crying or joining them. She was exhausted from weeks spent digging antitank trenches and had lost the use of her hands. She couldn’t even make a fist. Her palms had developed blisters, then sores that the spades and pickaxes split open afresh each day like razor blades.
In spite of that, every morning until then, she had been required to go back to shifting the mountain of earth. And every morning she could have howled in agony. She wanted nothing more than to kneel down and bury her hands in the soil, as if to put out a firebrand. Tears would blur her vision. Her breath would catch in her chest.
All the women had reached that point. Some would curse the Krauts at the top of their voices to help them muster up some courage. There was no question of giving up. The shame of giving up would have been worse than the agony of carrying on, so they would force themselves to pick up their shovels. The pain would shoot through their whole bodies. It would come in deliciously numbing, nauseous waves from the shoulders to the stomach, then gradually ease off, sinking like a ripple dipping out of sight on the surface of a lake.