The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Not all Bolsheviks were expected to possess a detailed knowledge of the Party’s ideology, of course. Among the rank and file it was enough to be involved in the daily practice of its rituals – its oaths and songs, ceremonies, cults and codes of conduct – just as the believers of an organized religion performed their belief when they attended church. But the Party’s doctrines were to be taken as articles of faith by all its followers. Its collective judgement was to be accepted as Justice. Accused of crimes by the leadership, the Party member was expected to repent, to go down on his knees before the Party and welcome its verdict against him. To defend oneself was to add another crime: dissent from the will of the Party. This explains why so many Bolsheviks surrendered to their fate in the purges, even when they were innocent of the crimes of which they stood accused. Their attitude was revealed in a conversation reported by a friend of the Bolshevik leader Iurii Piatakov not long after Piatakov’s expulsion from the Party as a Trotskyist in 1927. To earn his readmission Piatakov had recanted many of his oldest political beliefs, but this did not make him a coward, as his friend had charged. Rather, as Piatakov explained, it showed that

  a true Bolshevik will readily cast out from his mind ideas in which he has believed for years. A true Bolshevik has submerged his personality in the collectivity, ‘the Party’, to such an extent that he can make the necessary effort to break away from his own opinions and convictions… He would be ready to believe that black was white and white was black, if the Party required it.57

  Nevertheless, because he had changed his views so radically, Piatakov, like other ‘renegades’, was never fully trusted or believed by Stalin, who ordered his arrest in 1936.

  The purges began long before Stalin’s rise to power. They had their origins in the Civil War, when the Party’s ranks grew rapidly and its leaders were afraid of being swamped by careerists and ‘self-seekers’. The targets of the early purges were entire social groups: ‘regenerate bourgeois elements’, ‘kulaks’, and so on. Bolsheviks from a working-class background were exempt from scrutiny, unless a specific denunciation had been made against them at a purge meeting. But during the 1920s there was a gradual shift in the practice of the purge, with a growing emphasis on the private conduct and convictions of individual Bolsheviks.

  The shift was accompanied by an ever more elaborate system for the inspection and control of Party members’ private lives. Applicants to join the Party had to demonstrate belief in its ideology. Great stress was placed on when they were converted to the cause, and only those who had fought with the Red Army in the Civil War were taken to have proved their commitment. At regular intervals throughout their lives, Party members were required to write a short autobiography or to complete a questionnaire (anketa), giving details about their social background, their education and career, and the evolution of their political consciousness. These documents were essentially a form of public confession in which the Party members reaffirmed their worthiness to be of the elect. The key thing was to show that the formation of their political consciousness owed everything to the Revolution and the Party’s tutelage.58

  A tragic incident at the Leningrad Mining Academy served to buttress the Party’s insistence on supervising its members’ private life. In 1926, a student committed suicide at the academy hostel. It turned out that she had been driven to it by the cruel behaviour of her common-law husband. Konstantin Korenkov was not brought to trial, though he was excluded from the Komsomol on the grounds of ‘moral responsibility for the suicide of a comrade’. The Control Commission of the regional Party organization – a sort of regional Party court – overruled this decision, which it considered harsh, and replaced it with a ‘severe reprimand and warning’. A few weeks later Korenkov and his younger brother robbed the cashier’s office at the Mining Academy, stabbing the cashier to death and wounding his wife. The case was seized upon by Sofia Smidovich, a senior member of the Central Control Commission, the body placed in charge of Party ethics and legality, who portrayed ‘Korenkovism’ as an ‘illness’ whose main symptom was indifference to the morals and behaviour of one’s comrades:

  The private life of my comrade is not of my concern. The students’ collective watches how Korenkov locks up his sick, literally bleeding wife – well, that is his private life. He addresses her with curse words and humiliating remarks – nobody interferes. What’s more: in Korenkov’s room a shot resounds, and a student whose room is one floor beneath does not even think it necessary to check out what is going on. He considers it a private affair.

  Smidovich argued that it was the task of the collective to enforce moral standards among its members through mutual surveillance and intervention in their private lives. Only this, she argued, would foster real collectivism and a ‘Communist conscience’.59

  The system of mutual surveillance and denunciation which Smidovich envisaged was not entirely an invention of the Revolution of 1917. Denunciations had been a part of Russian governance for centuries. Petitions to the tsar against officials who abused their power had played a vital role in the tsarist system, reinforcing the popular myth of a ‘just tsar’ who (in the absence of any courts or other public institutions) protected the people from ‘evil servitors’. In Russian dictionaries the act of ‘denunciation’ (donos) was defined as a civic virtue (‘the revelation of illegal acts’) rather than a selfish or malicious act, and this definition was retained throughout the 1920s and 1930s.60 But under the Soviet regime, the culture of denunciation took on a new meaning and intensity. Soviet citizens were encouraged to report on neighbours, colleagues, friends and even relatives. Vigilance was the first duty of every Bolshevik. ‘Lenin taught us that every Party member should become an agent of the Cheka, that is, he should watch and write reports,’ argued Sergei Gusev, who had risen to become a senior member of the Central Control Commission.61 Party members were instructed to inform on their comrades, if they believed that their private thoughts or conduct threatened Party unity. In factories and barracks a list of candidates for membership was posted outside the office of the Party cell. Members of the collective were then invited to write denunciations against the candidates, pointing out their personal shortcomings (e.g. heavy drinking or rudeness), which would then be discussed at a Party meeting. Reports of private conversations became an increasingly common feature of this denunciatory practice, although some Party leaders expressed reservations about the morality of such actions. At the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925 it had been decided that reporting on a private conversation was generally to be frowned upon, but not if such conversation was deemed ‘a threat to Party unity’.62

  Invitations to denunication were central to the culture of the purge that developed during the 1920s. In Party and Soviet organizations there were regular purge meetings where Party members and officials were made to answer criticisms solicited from the rank and file in the form of written and oral denunciations. These meetings could get very personal, as the young Elena Bonner discovered, when she observed one in the Comintern hostel:

  They asked about people’s wives and sometimes about their children. It turned out that some people beat their wives and drank a lot of vodka. Batanya [Bonner’s grandmother] would have said that decent people don’t ask such questions. Sometimes the one being purged said that he wouldn’t beat his wife anymore or drink anymore. And a lot of them said about their work that they ‘wouldn’t do it anymore’ and that ‘they understood everything’. Then it resembled being called into the teacher’s room: the teacher sits, you stand, he scolds you, the other teachers smile nastily, and you quickly say, ‘I understand,’ ‘I won’t,’ ‘of course, I was wrong,’ but you don’t mean it, or just want to get out of there to join the other kids at recess. But these people were more nervous than you were with the teacher. Some of them were practically crying. It was unpleasant watching them. Each purge took a long time; some evenings they did three people, sometimes only one.63

  Increasingly, there was nothing in the private life of t
he Bolshevik that was not subject to the gaze and censure of the Party leadership. This public culture, where every member was expected to reveal his inner self to the collective, was unique to the Bolsheviks – there was nothing like it in the Nazi or the Fascist movement, where the individual Nazi or Fascist was allowed to have a private life, so long as he adhered to the Party’s rules and ideology – until the Cultural Revolution in China. Any distinction between private and public life was explicitly rejected by the Bolsheviks. ‘When a comrade says: “What I am doing now concerns my private life and not society,” we say that cannot be correct,’ wrote one Bolshevik in 1924.64 Everything in the Party member’s private life was social and political; everything he did had a direct impact on the Party’s interests. This was the meaning of ‘Party unity’ – the complete fusion of the individual with the public life of the Party.

  In his book on Party Ethics, Solts conceived of the Party as a self-policing collective, where every Bolshevik would scrutinize and criticize his comrades’ private motives and behaviour. In this way, he imagined, the individual Bolshevik would come to know himself through the eyes of the Party. Yet in reality this mutual surveillance did just the opposite: it encouraged people to present themselves as conforming to Soviet ideals whilst concealing their true selves in a secret private sphere. Such dissimulation would become widespread in the Soviet system, which demanded the display of loyalty and punished the expression of dissent. During the terror of the 1930s, when secrecy and deception became necessary survival strategies for almost everyone in the Soviet Union, a whole new type of personality and society arose. But this double-life was already a reality for large sections of the population in the 1920s, especially for Party families, who lived in the public eye, and for those whose social background or beliefs made them vulnerable to repression. People learned to wear a mask and act the role of loyal Soviet citizens, even if they lived by other principles in the privacy of their own home.

  Talk was dangerous in this society. Family conversations repeated outside the home could lead to arrest and imprisonment. Children were the main source of danger. Naturally talkative, they were too young to understand the political significance of what they overheard. The playground, especially, was a breeding ground of informers. ‘We were taught to hold our tongues and not to speak to anyone about our family,’ recalls the daughter of a middle-ranking Bolshevik official in Saratov:

  There were certain rules of listening and talking that we children had to learn. What we overheard the adults say in a whisper, or what we heard them say behind our backs, we knew we could not repeat to anyone. We would be in trouble if we even let them know that we had heard what they had said. Sometimes the adults would say something and then would tell us, ‘The walls have ears,’ or ‘Watch your tongue,’ or some other expression… But mostly, we learned these rules instinctively. No one explained to us that what was spoken might be dangerous politically, but somehow we understood.65

  Nina Iakovleva grew up in an atmosphere of silent opposition to the Soviet regime. Her mother came from a noble family in Kostroma that had fled the Bolsheviks in the Civil War; her father was a Socialist Revolutionary* who had been imprisoned after taking part in the large-scale peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks in Tambov province in 1921 (he escaped from jail and ran away to Leningrad, where he was rearrested in 1926 and sentenced to five years in the Suzdal special isolation prison camp). Growing up in the 1920s, Nina knew instinctively that she was not allowed to speak about her father to her friends at school. ‘My mother was demonstratively silent about politics,’ recalls Nina. ‘She made a declaration of her lack of interest in political affairs.’ From this silence Nina learned to hold her tongue. ‘No one laid down specific rules about what could be spoken, but there was a general feeling, an atmosphere within the family, that made it clear to us that we were not to speak about father.’ Nina also learned to mistrust everyone outside her immediate family. ‘I love no one, I love only Mama, Papa and aunt Liuba,’ she wrote to her father in 1926. ‘I only love our family. I love no one else.’66

  Galina Adasinskaia was born in 1921 to a family of active oppositionists. Her father was a Socialist Revolutionary; her mother and grandmother Mensheviks (all three were arrested in 1929). In the 1920s, when it was still possible for former SRs and Mensheviks to work in the Soviet government, Galina’s parents lived a double life. Her father worked in the administration of cooperatives, an economic organization promoted by the NEP, and her mother in the Ministry of Trade, yet in private both retained their old political opinions. Galina was protected and excluded from this secret sphere of politics. She was brought up to become a ‘Soviet child’ (she joined the Pioneers and the Komsomol). ‘Politics was something that my parents did at work, or wrote about. But at home they never spoke about such things… They thought of politics as a dirty business.’67

  The households Nina and Galina were brought up in may have been extreme, but the rules of silence which they learned instinctively were observed by many families. Sofia Ozemblovskaia, the daughter of the Polish nobleman who was banned from the Pioneers after being spotted at church, lived with her family in the front half of a wooden house in a village near Minsk. ‘At home we never talked about politics or anything like that,’ she remembers. ‘Father always said, “The walls have ears.” Once he even showed us how to hear our neighbours’ conversation by listening through a glass against the wall. Then we understood. From then on we too were afraid of our neighbours.’68

  Liubov (Liuba) Tetiueva was born in 1923 in Cherdyn, a small town in the Urals. Her father, Aleksandr, an Orthodox priest, was arrested in 1922 and held in prison for the best part of a year. After his release he was put under pressure by OGPU (the political police) to become an informer and write reports on his own parishioners, but he refused. The Cherdyn soviet deprived the Tetiuevs of civil rights and a rationing card when rationing was introduced in 1929.* Aleksandr’s church was taken over by the ‘renovationists’ (obnovlentsy), church reformers who sought to simplify the Orthodox liturgy and who had the backing of the Soviet regime. Shortly afterwards, Aleksandr was arrested for a second time, following a denunciation by the obnovlentsy, who accused him of sowing ‘discord among believers’ (by refusing to join them). Liubov’s mother was dismissed from her job in the Cherdyn Museum, where she worked on the library catalogue, while the elder of her two brothers was expelled from his school and the Komsomol. The family depended on the earnings of Liubov’s older sister, who worked as a schoolteacher. Liubov recalls her childhood in the 1920s:

  The Tetiuev family (Liubov, aged four, seated centre), Cherdyn, 1927

  If my parents needed to talk about something important, they would always go outside the house and speak to one another in whispers. Sometimes they would talk with my grandmother in the yard. They never held such conversations in front of the children – never… Not once did they have an argument or talk critically about Soviet power – though they had much to criticize – not once in any case that we could hear. The one thing my mother always said to us was: ‘Don’t you lot go chattering, don’t go chattering. The less you hear the better.’ We grew up in a house of whisperers.69

  4

  Many families experienced a growing generation split during the 1920s: the customs and habits of the old society remained dominant in the private spaces of the home, where seniority ruled, but young people were increasingly exposed to the influence of Soviet propaganda through school, the Pioneers and the Komsomol. For the older generation the situation posed a moral dilemma: on the one hand, they wanted to pass down family traditions and beliefs to their children; on the other, they had to bring them up as Soviet citizens.

  Grandparents were the main transmitters of traditional values in most families. The grandmother, in particular, played a special role, taking prime responsibility for the upbringing of the children and the running of the household, if both the parents worked, or playing an important auxiliary role, if the mother worked part-time. I
n the words of the poet Vladimir Kornilov, ‘It seemed that in our years there were no mothers. / There were only grandmothers.’70 The influence of the grandmother was felt in a variety of ways. By running the household, the grandmother had a direct effect on children’s manners and habits. She told the children stories of ‘the old days’ (before 1917), which in time could serve as a reference-point or counterweight to Soviet history, enabling them to question the propaganda they were fed in school. She kept alive the cultural values of the nineteenth century by reading to the children from pre-revolutionary Russian literature, little read in Soviet schools, or by taking them to the theatre, galleries or concert halls.71

  Elena Bonner was brought up by her grandmother. ‘Batania, not Mama, was the centre of my life,’ she later wrote. As Party activists, Elena’s mother and father were often absent from the Bonner home. In her relationship with her grandmother Elena found the love and affection she longed for but did not receive from her parents. Batania provided a moral counterbalance to the Soviet influence of Elena’s mother and father. As a child, Elena was aware that her grandmother – a plump but ‘astonishingly beautiful’ woman with a ‘calm and imperious manner’ – inhabited a different world from the Soviet one in which her parents lived.