The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Batania’s friends and acquaintances rarely came to our building, where only she and the children were not Party members. But I often went with her to call on them. I saw that they lived differently – they had different dishes, different furniture. (At our house Batania was the only one with normal furniture and a few nice things…) They talked about everything differently. I felt (this impression definitely came from Papa and Mama) that they were a different sort of people – what I couldn’t tell was whether they were worse or better.

  Batania Bonner with her grandchildren (from left: Zoria, Elena, Yegorka), Moscow, 1929

  Batania’s conservative moral outlook was rooted in the world of the Russian-Jewish bourgeoisie. She was hard-working, strict but caring, entirely dedicated to the family. During the 1920s Batania worked as a ‘specialist’ (spets) – a much-derided but still necessary class of ‘bourgeois’ experts and technicians – in the Leningrad customs office, where she was an accountant. She earned more than Bonner’s parents on the ‘Party Maximum’. Batania had old-fashioned frugal attitudes about money and housekeeping that were a source of constant friction with the ‘Soviet regime’ Elena’s parents imposed on the household. She read a lot but ‘stubbornly refused to read contemporary literature’ and did not go, ‘on principle’, to the cinema, such was her disdain for the modern world. She had ‘nothing but scorn for the new order’, talked disaparagingly of the Party leaders and scolded her own daughter for the excesses of the Bolshevik dictatorship. When she was really angry she would say things starting with the phrase: ‘Let me remind you that before that Revolution of yours…’ After the Soviet government banned the Shrovetide holiday, the most colourful in the Orthodox calendar, Batania, who sympathized with all old customs, told her granddaughter: ‘Well, you can thank your mummy and daddy for this.’ Not surprisingly, Elena was confused by the clash of values in her family. ‘There was a colossal conflict over our education,’ she recalls in interview.

  Grandmother would bring home books for me from the Children’s Golden Library, various stupidities, and Mama disapprovingly would purse her lips, though she never dared say anything to grandmother. Mama brought home different books, Pavel Korchagin,* for example, which she brought home for me in manuscript, and I read that too. I didn’t know which type of book I liked better.

  Elena loved her grandmother and respected her ‘more than anyone else in the world’, but, not surprisingly, she wanted to identify with her parents and their world: ‘I always perceived Papa’s and Mama’s friends as my own kind and Batania’s as strangers. In essence, I already belonged to the Party.’72

  In the Moscow home of Anatoly Golovnia, the cameraman for most of Vsevolod Pudovkin’s films in the 1920s and 1930s, Anatoly’s mother Lydia Ivanovna was a domineering influence. Born into a Greek merchant family from Odessa, she had been educated at the Smolny Institute, where she acquired the refined attitudes and habits of the Russian aristocracy. Lydia passed on these customs to the Golovnia household, which she ran with iron discipline in the ‘Russian Victorian’ manner. Lydia was contemptuous of the ‘vulgar’ manners of Anatoly’s wife, a film actress of extraordinary beauty called Liuba, who had come to Moscow from a poor peasant family in Cheliabinsk. She thought her taste for expensive clothes and furniture reflected the material acquisitiveness of the ‘new Soviet bourgeoisie’, the class of peasants and workers rising through the ranks of the bureaucracy. In a heated argument, after Liuba came home from a shopping spree, she told her that she represented ‘the Revolution’s ugly side’. Lydia herself had simple tastes. She always dressed in the same black full-length dress with deep pockets in which she kept a powder case and a lorgnette. A survivor of the famine that swept through south-east Russia and Ukraine at the end of the Civil War, she lived in fear of starvation, although Anatoly’s earnings were more than adequate to provide for the household, which also included Liuba’s sister and her daughter Oksana. Lydia planned out every meal in a small notebook, with exact quantities of the necessary items that needed to be bought. She had her favourite shops, the elite Filippovsky bakery and the Yeliseyev store on Tverskaia Street, where ‘she would allow herself the luxury of drinking an iced glass of tomato juice’. Looking back on her childhood, Oksana wrote in 1985:

  Grandmother was a very modest and disciplined person. She was something of a moralist, a pedagogue perhaps. She always tried to do the ‘correct thing’. I remember how she liked to say to her son, who was a convinced Bolshevik: ‘If you did things as I do them, you would have built your Communism long ago.’ She was fearless about what she said, and concealed nothing of what she thought or did. She believed strongly that ideas should be spoken clearly and aloud, without pretence, deceit or fear. She often said to me: ‘Do not whisper, it is rude!’* Now I realize that she behaved this way to set a moral example to her granddaughter – to show me the correct way to behave. Thank you, Grandmother!73

  Grandmothers were also the main practitioners and guardians of religious faith. It was nearly always the grandmother who organized the christening of a Soviet child, sometimes without its parents’ knowledge or consent, who took the children to church and passed down religious customs and beliefs. Even if they retained their religious faith, the parents of Soviet children were less likely to communicate it to them, partly out of fear that the exposure of such beliefs, say in school, could have disastrous consequences for the family. ‘My grandmother took me to be christened, although my father and mother were violently opposed,’ recalls Vladimir Fomin, who was born into a family of factory workers in Kolpino, near Leningrad. ‘It was all done in secret in a country church. My parents were afraid that they would lose their jobs at the factory if people found out that I had been christened.’74

  A grandmother’s religious beliefs could set the child on a collision course with the ideological system in Soviet schools. Born in 1918 to a family of wealthy Tiflis engineers, Yevgeniia Yevangulova spent much of her childhood with her grandparents in Rybinsk, because her father, Pavel, who was Chief of Mines in the Soviet Mining Council, was frequently on work trips in Siberia, while her mother, Nina, who was studying in Moscow, could not cope with the child care. A devout merchant’s wife of the old school, Yevgeniia’s grandmother was a major influence on her upbringing. She gave her a little cross to wear beneath her blouse on her first day at school. But a group of boys discovered it and made fun of her. ‘She believes in God!’ they pointed and shouted. Yevgeniia was traumatized by the incident. She turned inward. When she was invited to join the Pioneers, she refused, a rare act of protest among children of her age, and later on refused to join the Komsomol.75

  Boris Gavrilov was born in 1921. His father was a factory manager and senior Party member in one of the industrial suburbs of Leningrad. His mother was a schoolteacher. Boris was brought up by his maternal grandmother, the widow of a wealthy ivory merchant, whose religious faith had a lasting influence on him:

  Grandmother had her own room – we had five rooms altogether – where the walls were covered with religious images and large icons with their votive lamps. It was the only room in the house where icons were allowed by my father. My grandmother went to church and took me along with her, without telling my father. I loved the Easter service, although it was very long… This church was her only joy – she didn’t go to the theatre or the cinema – and all she read were religious books, which were also the first books I learned to read. My mother was religious too, but she didn’t go to church. She didn’t have the time, and my father wouldn’t have allowed it in any case. At school I was taught to be an atheist. But I was more attached to the beauty of the church. When my grandmother died, and my parents were divorced [in 1934], my mother encouraged me to keep going to church. Sometimes I even received communion and went to confession. I have always worn a cross, although I don’t consider myself to be especially religious. Naturally, I never said a word about my religion at school, or when I joined the army [in 1941]. Things like that had to be concealed.76
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br />   The division between home and school created conflicts in many families. Children were often confused by the contradiction between what their parents said and what they were taught by their teachers. ‘At home you hear one thing, and at school another. I don’t know which is best,’ a schoolboy wrote in 1926. The issue of religion was particularly confusing. One schoolgirl noted feeling ‘torn between two forces’: at school she was taught that ‘there is no God, but at home my grandmother says that God exists’. The question of religion divided young and old, especially in the countryside, where teachers encouraged children to challenge the beliefs and authority of their elders. ‘Over tea, I argued with my mother about the existence of a God,’ wrote one rural schoolboy in 1926. ‘She said that Soviet power was wrong to fight religion and crack down on the priests. But I assured her: “No, Mama, you are wrong. Soviet power is correct. The priest is a liar.”’ Once they joined the Pioneers, children grew in confidence. They became conscious of themselves as members of a movement dedicated to sweeping away the backward customs of the past. ‘One day during Lent, when I came home from school, my grandmother gave me just potatoes for my tea,’ wrote one Pioneer. ‘I complained, and my grandmother said, “Don’t be angry, the Lenten fast has not yet passed.” But I replied: “For you that may be so, because you are old. But we are Pioneers, and we are not obliged to recognize these rituals.”’ This assertiveness was even more pronounced in the Komsomol, where militant atheism was considered a sign of a ‘progressive’ political consciousness, and almost a prerequisite of membership.77

  Parents had to choose very carefully what to tell their children about God, often making a conscious decision not to give their children a religious upbringing, even if they themselves had religious leanings. They recognized that their children needed to adapt to Soviet culture if they were to succeed in their adult lives. This compromise was particularly common in professional families, who understood that the fulfilment of a child’s ambitions was dependent on accreditation from the state. One engineer, the son of an architect, recalls that his parents were brought up before the Revolution to believe in God and to follow the principles which they had been taught by his grandparents. But he was brought up to honour different principles, ‘to be decent’, as he put it, ‘and to respond to all the social demands made of him’. A similar situation prevailed in the Moscow household of Pyotr and Maria Skachkova, both librarians. Although they were religious and always went to church, they did not educate their three daughters to believe in God. As one of them recalls:

  My parents thought this way: once religion was prohibited, they would not talk about it with their children, because we would have to live in a different society from the one in which they had grown up. They did not want to make us lead a double life, should we join the Pioneers, or the Komsomol.78

  Many families did lead a double life. They celebrated Soviet public holidays like 1 May and 7 November (Revolution Day) and conformed to the regime’s atheist ideology, yet still observed their religious faith in the privacy of their own home. Yekaterina Olitskaia was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In the 1920s she was exiled to Riazan, where she moved in with an old woman, the widow of a former railway worker, and her daughter, a Komsomol member who worked in a paper factory. The old woman was devoutly religious but, on her daughter’s insistence, she kept her icons in a secret cupboard concealed by a curtain in the back room of the house. Her daughter was afraid that she would be fired if the Komsomol discovered that there were icons in her home. ‘On Sundays and big holidays they would draw the curtains in the evening and light the votive lamps,’ writes Olitskaia. ‘They would usually make sure to lock the doors.’ Antonina Kostikova grew up in a similarly secretive household. Her father was the peasant chairman of a village Soviet in Saratov province from 1922 to 1928, but he privately maintained his Orthodox faith. ‘Our parents were very religious,’ recalls Antonina. ‘They knew all the prayers. Father was especially devout, but he rarely spoke about religion, only when at home at night. He never let us [his three children] see him pray. He told us that we had to learn what they told us about God at school.’ Antonina’s mother, a simple peasant woman, kept an icon hidden in a compartment inside a table drawer which Antonina only found on her mother’s death in the 1970s.79

  The secret observance of religious rituals occurred even in Party families. Indeed it was quite common, judging from a report by the Central Control Commission which revealed that almost half the members expelled from the Party in 1925 had been purged because of religious observance. There were numerous Party households where Christ rubbed shoulders with the Communist ideal, and Lenin’s portrait was displayed together with the family icons in the ‘red’ or ‘holy’ corner of the living room.80

  The nanny, another carrier of traditional Russian values within the Soviet family, was a natural ally of the grandmother. Nannies were employed by many urban families, especially in households where both parents worked. There was an almost limitless supply of nannies from the countryside, particularly after 1928, when millions of peasants fled into the cities to escape collectivization, and they brought with them the customs and beliefs of the peasantry.

  Virtually all the Bolsheviks employed nannies to take care of their children. It was a practical necessity for most Party women, at least until the state provided universal nursery care, because they went out to work. In many Party families the nanny acted as a moral counterweight to the household’s ruling Soviet attitudes. Ironically the most senior Bolsheviks tended to employ the most expensive nannies, who generally held reactionary opinions. The Bonners, for example, had a series of nannies, including one who had worked in Count Sheremetev’s household in St Petersburg, a Baltic German (an acquaintance of Batania’s old landowner friends) who taught the children ‘good manners’, and even one who had once worked for the Imperial family.81

  Peasant nanny, Fursei family (Leningrad)

  Nannies could exert a profound influence on family life. In the Leningrad household of the Party activists Anna Karpitskaia and Pyotr Nizovtsev, for example, there was a peasant nanny called Masha, a devout Old Believer,* who observed her religious rituals in their home. She ate separately using her own plates and cutlery, prayed every morning and evening in her room and involved the children in the elaborate rites of her belief. Masha also practised as a healer, as she had done in her native village in the northern Russian countryside, making herbal remedies to cure the children of various illnesses. A kind and caring person, Masha earned the respect of her employers, who protected her from the Soviet authorities’ pursuit of religious activists. Her presence contributed to the rare liberal atmosphere that prevailed in this household. ‘We did not think it strange to have an Old Believer in the family,’ recalls Anna’s daughter Marksena. ‘There was no trace in our household of the militant atheism found in other Party households at that time. We were brought up to be tolerant of all religions and beliefs, although we ourselves were atheists.’82

  Natasha Ovchinnikova

  Inna Gaister was another child of Bolsheviks who was deeply affected by the counter-values of her nanny. Inna’s father, Aron Gaister, was a senior economist in Gosplan (the State Planning Commission); her mother, Rakhil Kaplan, an economist in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Both her parents came from labouring families in the Pale of Settlement, the south-west corner of the Russian Empire, where the tsar’s Jews had been forced to live. The couple met in Gomel, a town in Belarus; they joined the Party in the Civil War and in 1920 moved to Moscow, to a communal apartment. Aron studied at the Institute of Red Professors, while Rakhil worked in the Textile Workers’ Union. Like many Soviet Jews, the Gaisters invested their hopes in the programme of industrialization, which they believed would end all backwardness, inequality and exploitation in the Soviet Union. Two months after the birth of their first child, Inna, in 1925, they hired a nanny called Natasha, who moved into their new home. Natasha Ovchinnikova came from a peasant family in Riaza
n province, south of Moscow, whose small farm had been ruined by the Bolshevik grain requisitionings of the Civil War. During the famine of 1921 Natasha fled to the capital. She rarely spoke about her family in the Gaister home. But even at the age of eight or nine, Inna was aware that the world her nanny grew up in was very different from the one in which her parents lived. Inna noticed how Natasha prayed in church; she heard her crying in her room. She saw the poverty of her relatives from Riazan – who had also made their way to the capital and were living as illegal immigrants in a crowded barracks – when she went with her to visit them. Natasha’s niece, a girl with whom Inna liked to play, had no shoes, so Inna brought her a pair of her own and then lied that she had lost them when her parents asked about the missing shoes. Although still too young to question anything politically, Inna had already formed a tacit alliance with Natasha and her family.83

  The peasant world from which these nannies came was largely dominated by the traditions of the patriarchal family. In 1926, the peasantry represented 82 per cent of the Soviet population – 120 million people (in a total population of 147 million people) dispersed in 613,000 villages and remote settlements across the Soviet Union.84 The peasantry’s attachment to individual family labour on the private household farm made it the last major bastion of individualism in Soviet Russia and, in the view of the Bolsheviks, the main social obstacle to their Communist utopia.