The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  This upbringing had a crucial influence on Simonov. The military values which he assimilated as a child (‘obedience and conscientiousness, a readiness to overcome all obstacles, the imperative to say “yes” or “no”, to love strongly, and to hate as well’, as he himself defined these qualities) prepared him to embrace the quasi-military Soviet system of political command in the 1930s and 1940s.

  At thirteen years I knew:

  That what is said is meant.

  Yes is yes. No is no.

  To argue is in vain.

  I knew the meaning of duty.

  I knew what sacrifices were.

  I knew what courage could achieve,

  There is no mercy for cowardice!

  (From ‘Father’, 1956)97

  Simonov revered his stepfather (‘a man I never saw in anything but military uniform’) and from an early age considered him to be his real father. The military principles of duty and obedience he assimilated from Aleksandr were combined in him with the ideas of public service he received from his mother and her aristocratic milieu. These principles were reinforced by the books he read as a boy, which were infused with the Soviet cult of the military. He was inspired by legendary stories of the Civil War, like Dmitry Furmanov’s Chapaev (1925), a ‘Soviet classic’ read by every schoolchild. His boyhood heroes were all military men. His schoolbooks were filled with doodles of the soldier he wanted to become.98 Just as early, Simonov was conscious of the need to take his place in a hierarchy of command. He was brought up to think of himself not just as a soldier, but as an officer, with responsibility for lesser men. At the same time, his hypertrophied sense of public duty and obedience also required subordination to his superiors. As he himself would write, his idea of ‘being good’ was synonymous with ‘honesty’ and ‘conscientiousness’ (poriadochnost’) – a concept that would later form the basis of his support for the Stalinist regime. All his formative relationships involved figures of authority. As an only child, he spent most of his time in the company of adults, and he was quite adept at winning their approval. Without close friends at school, he never really learned the moral lessons of friendship, or loyalty to peers, which might have worked against his growing tendency to please superiors, although comradeship was a dominating theme of his poetry (a sphere for his yearnings) in the 1930s and 1940s. Simonov was clever and precocious. He read a lot and studied hard. He joined lots of clubs, took part in plays and was a Pioneer. Aside from his doodles, his schoolbooks reveal a serious boy who spent long hours drawing maps and graphs, making lists and charts and organizing tasks like a bureaucrat.99

  Konstantin (far left), Aleksandra and Aleksandr Ivanishev (right), Riazan, 1927

  In his memoirs, written in the last year of his life, Simonov maintained that his parents had accepted the Soviet regime. He could not remember any conversations in which they had voiced their disapproval of the government, or regretted not having emigrated after 1917. In his presentation,

  Page from Simonov’s school notebook (1923)

  his parents took the view that, as members of the intelligentsia, it was their duty to stay and work for Soviet Russia and, even if their own values were not ‘Soviet’, it was their obligation to bring up Konstantin as a ‘Soviet’ child. But this is only half the truth. Behind her appearance of political loyalty, Aleksandra concealed a critical opinion of the Soviet regime, which had, after all, brought disaster to her family. Aleksandra’s brother Nikolai was forced to flee to Paris after 1917 (as a former governor of Kharkov province, he would have been arrested by the Bolsheviks). She never saw him again. The rest of the family – Aleksandra, her mother and three sisters – lived in fear and poverty, first in Petrograd and then in Riazan. After the Civil War, Aleksandra’s sisters Sonia and Daria returned to Petrograd; and when their mother died in 1923, Liudmila went back to Petrograd as well. Left on her own in Riazan, Aleksandra struggled to adapt to the Soviet environment (‘I was born in another world,’ she wrote to her son in 1944. ‘The first twenty-five years of my life were spent in conditions of comfort… Then my life was suddenly destroyed… I washed and cooked and went to the shops and worked all day’). In addition to passing on the values of the aristocracy, Aleksandra also strove to keep religious practices alive. She took her son to church until he was twelve (in his later letters to his aunts he continues to greet them in religious terms on Orthodox holidays). Yet she also taught him that his noble origins were dangerous and that they needed to be hidden if he was to advance.100 Despite the relatively liberal climate of the NEP, the class war unleashed by the Revolution had only come to a temporary halt, and, beneath the peaceful surface, pressures were growing for a renewed purge of the old elites which threatened families like the Simonovs.

  In 1927, Simonov was taken by his mother to stay with relatives of his stepfather in the countryside near Kremenchug. ‘Aunt Zhenia’ lived with her husband, Yevgeny Lebedev, an old general who had long ago retired from the tsarist army on account of his wounded leg, which left him paralysed and dependent on his younger wife. The general was a liberal type, good-natured and optimistic, and he did not grumble or complain about the Soviet government. Konstantin enjoyed his company, because he was interesting and told stories well. One day, after walking in the woods, Konstantin came back to his aunt’s house. The door was opened by a stranger, who turned out to be one of several OGPU men, who had come to search the house for incriminating evidence of counter-revolutionary activity prior to the arrest of the general. In his memoirs Simonov recalls the incident:

  At the moment I entered one of the OGPU men was lifting up the mattress, on which the old man was resting, and searching underneath… ‘Sit down, boy, and wait,’ he said to me, pointing to a stool. He was not exactly rude, more imperious, and I understood that I had to sit and obey him… The search was being conducted by two men in uniform, but they had not produced a search warrant, and the old general was cursing them, getting very angry, and threatening to complain about their unlawful behaviour. Aunt Zhenia, it seemed to me, was relatively calm, fearing most of all that her husband might have a heart attack, and tried to calm him down without success. The men carried on with the search, leafing through the pages of every book in turn, looking under oilcloths and embroideries that were stacked on shelves. The old man, propped up against the wall and half-lying on the bed, continued cursing… Finally, the search came to an end, and, without taking anything, the men left. They behaved with restraint, they did not swear or scold, because they were dealing with an old man who was paralysed… In my consciousness this event did not appear as something frightening, tragic or disturbing; it seemed more or less normal.

  The interesting thing about this episode is the way it was perceived by Simonov. He had witnessed an illegal act of state repression against his family, but he was not frightened by it, or so he later claimed; somehow he even saw it as a routine (‘normal’) procedure. Simonov would respond in a similar manner to the arrest of other relatives, including his stepfather and three aunts, during the 1930s, rationalizing the events as ‘necessary’ acts – mistakes, perhaps, because his relatives were surely innocent, but understandable in the broader context of the state’s need to root out potential counter-revolutionaries.101

  In 1928, Simonov moved with his parents to Saratov, a large industrial city on the Volga, where Aleksandr became an instructor in the military school. The family lived in the barracks, occupying two adjoining rooms, and shared a communal kitchen with several other families. Simonov began at a secondary school, but in 1929, at the age of just fourteen, he abandoned it, deciding not to complete the academic education planned for him by his parents, but to switch to a Factory Apprentice School (FZU), where general education was combined with technical training. Like many children of the old intelligentsia, Simonov was eager to fashion a new ‘proletarian’ identity for himself so as to break free of his social origins, which were certain to hold him back in Soviet society. The FZUs and higher technical institutions of the late 1920
s were full of children from intelligentsia families who, refused entry to university (which now favoured applicants from the working class), had gone instead to factory or technical schools to qualify as ‘proletarians’, a qualification that would open doors to further jobs and education. Like Simonov, who registered his mother as an ‘office worker’, many children from the old elite concealed their social origins, or made selective use of their biographies, to gain admission to technical schools and colleges. Most went on to become engineers or technicians in the industrial revolution of the First Five Year Plan (1928–32), developing a new professional identity that liberated them from the great dilemma about social class – because all that mattered was their dedication to the cause of Soviet industry. Simonov’s rejection of the academic education chosen for him by his parents was significant: it was the moment when he turned his back on the old civilization, into which he had been born, and adopted a ‘Soviet’ identity.

  At the FZU Simonov learned to become a lathe-turner. In the evenings he worked as an apprentice at a munitions factory in Saratov. Simonov had ‘no real talent for industrial work’, as he later came to recognize, and only persevered ‘from vanity’. In his letters to his aunt Sonia in Leningrad, the teenage boy displayed his social activism and enthusiasm for the Soviet cause:

  1929

  Dear Auntie Sonia!

  Forgive me for taking so long to reply to your nice letter. I have never been so busy. I am a member of four clubs: I’m on the governing committee of two of them, and the chairman of one (the young naturalists). Besides that, I’m a member of the commission of [socialist] competition, the reading group, the school’s editorial board and the chemical brigade [against posion-gas attacks]. I’m also an instructor in collective assistance, a member of the management committee [reporting to the school administration on the political activities and opinions of the students at the FZU] and part of MOPR [the International Society of Workers’ Aid]. At the moment, I’m also organizing anti-religious propaganda through the management sub-committee and running the class committee. Recently I was placed in charge of organizing a chess club in the school. I think that’s all of it.102

  It is hard to say what lay behind this frenzy of activity – the energies of a teenager brought up in the public-service ethos, the calculation that through these commitments he might hide his social origins and secure his position in Soviet society, or a passionate belief in the Communist ideal. But it was the start of Simonov’s involvement in the Stalinist regime.

  6

  The mercantile class, too, found ways to adapt to the new regime, especially after the introduction of the NEP. In 1922, Samuil Laskin, his wife and their three daughters left the town of Orsha and settled in Moscow. The family moved into a basement room near the Sukharevka market, which was then a by-word for the private trade that flourished under the NEP. Samuil Laskin was a small tradesman, a dealer in herring and other salted fish. Like many Jews, he had come to Moscow to take advantage of the new opportunities for private traders. He had all sorts of dreams for his daughters, wanting them to benefit from Soviet schools and universities so that they could join the professions, from which, as a Jew, he had been barred before 1917.

  Born in 1879, Samuil came from a large clan of traders in Orsha, a market town of single-storeyed wooden houses, without running water or sewers, in the Pale of Settlement. His father, Moisei, a wholesale merchant of salted fish, lived in a run-down wooden house between the Orthodox and Catholic churches on the busy road to Shklov. Orsha was a multi-cultural town where Russians, Poles, Belorussians, Latvians and Lithuanians lived together with the Jews (there was one small pogrom in 1905). The Laskins spoke Yiddish and Russian. They observed the Jewish rituals, went to synagogue and sent their children to the Jewish school, but they also placed a high value on their children’s education and advancement in Russian society. Moisei had six children. The three oldest (Sima, Saul and Samuil) were all schooled at home; but the younger children (Fania, Iakov and Zhenia) went to university and qualified as doctors, somehow managing to circumvent the tsarist restrictions that barred Jews from Russian universities and professions.* It was an extraordinary achievement for those times, especially for the two girls, Fania and Zhenia.103

  Samuil followed Moisei into trade. In 1907, he married Berta, the daughter of a Jewish trader in the neighbouring town of Shklov, where the couple lived with their three daughters, Fania (born in 1909), Sonia (1911) and Yevgeniia (1914), until the Revolution of 1917. A kind and gentle man, practical and wise, with a lively interest in literature and international politics, Samuil embraced the Revolution as the liberation of the Jews. He had always dreamed of educating his beloved daughters, and with the declaration of the NEP, which made it possible for him to make a living in Moscow, he thought his dream would at last come true.

  The NEP turned Moscow into a vast market-place. The city’s population doubled in the five years after 1921. After the hardships of the Civil War, when private trade had been outlawed, there was a huge demand for anything the market could provide. Great crowds flocked to the street markets, like the Sukharevka, where traders dealt in everything, from scrap-iron to clothes, pots and pans, and works of art. Samuil had a herring stall on Bolotnaia Square, a food market that catered to the city’s busy restaurants and cafés, on the south side of the Moscow River, not far from the Kremlin. No one knew more than Samuil did about the herring trade. He could open a tin of the salted fish and tell at once where it had come from – the Volga River or the Aral Sea, near Astrakhan or Nizhny Novgorod.

  Life was hard at first. The Laskins’ basement room on First Meshchanskaia Street was bare. They slept on mattresses on the floor and suspended a curtain from the ceiling to separate the children’s sleeping area from the adults’. They shared a toilet and a kitchen with the other residents on the upper floor. But by 1923, Samuil’s herring business was thriving, and the Laskins moved into a rented flat on the second floor of a once-grand house on Sretenskaia Street. It was a comfortable apartment with three spacious rooms, a large bathroom and its own private toilet and kitchen, a rare luxury in Moscow in those days. Samuil was doing so well that he was able to send money every month to his parents in Orsha, and to help his nephew Mark, who had also come to Moscow with his family. There were regular Laskin outings to the Bolshoi Theatre, where Samuil always bought a box.104

  But then, in 1923–4, shortages of goods and price inflation inflamed proletarian resentment of the NEPmen and their new wealth, and to quash popular unrest the city Soviets closed down 300,000 private businesses.105 The Laskins became victims of the backlash. Samuil’s business survived, but he was forced to pay a special tax to the Moscow Soviet and, like many small tradesmen, he was relegated to the sub-class of lishentsy – people who were deprived of electoral and other civil rights. Samuil endured these punishments calmly. For several years he paid the excessive ‘business rent’ on his corrugated-iron stall – one of many special taxes imposed by the Moscow Soviet on private traders to appease the working class’s resentment of the NEP. In 1925, Samuil turned down an invitation to move to Iran, where the fish industry was heavily dependent on Russian expertise. He wanted his three daughters to grow up in the Soviet Union, to take advantage of the many opportunities he believed – mistakenly, as it turned out – had opened up. Fania was the eldest and most practical of the three girls. In 1926, she passed her school exams with distinction, but because of her father’s status as a lishenets, she was rejected when she applied to a medical college, so she worked instead in a factory and studied economics at night school. Sonia was a serious-minded girl, articulate and bright with a striking beauty, who had suffered from polio as a child, which left her partly paralysed. Barred like her sister from higher education, Sonia studied statistics in evening classes at the Sokolniki Industrial School in Moscow, before enrolling at the Institute of Steel in 1928. Like many Jews, including her cousin Mark, who became an engineer, Sonia embraced the industrial programme of the First Fiv
e Year Plan, which promised to modernize the backward peasant Russia, the Russia of pogroms, from which the Laskins had come to the city to escape. Yevgeniia (Zhenia), the youngest of the girls, was more artistic in her temperament and studied literature, a passion shared by all her family. The Laskin household was ‘always in the middle of a literary debate’, recalls Fania. When Sonia was rejected by the Komsomol, as a child of a lishenets, in 1927, the three girls formed a reading circle of their own with Mark and children of their parents’ friends who lived nearby. They would discuss politics and hold ‘show trials’ of characters from literature. Once they held a trial of the Old Testament: they found a copy of the Bible and studied it together for a month.106 Public trials of literary works, ideologies and religious customs were popular agitprop events in the 1920s and 1930s.

  The Laskin family (from left to right): Berta, Sonia, Yevgeniia (Zhenia), Fania, Moscow, 1930. Samuil was in exile at this time