The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Berzin attempted – not without success – to solve the problem of colonizing this severe and isolated region and the allied problem of reforging the souls of the convicts. A man with a ten-year sentence could accumulate enough work credits to be released in two or three years. Under Berzin there was excellent food, a workday of four to six hours in the winter and ten in the summer, and colossal salaries for convicts, which permitted them to help their families and return to the mainland as well-to-do men when their sentences were up… The cemeteries dating back to those days are so few in number that the early residents of Kolyma seemed immortal to those who came later.59

  Vishlag itself was dismantled in 1934, but by then the pulp-and-paper mill at Krasnovishersk had become an industrial centre, a major economic power in the northern Urals, drawing many peasants into industry.

  The rise of industry required engineers and other technical specialists. Ivan Uglitskikh was born in 1920 to a peasant family in Fyodortsovo, in the Cherdyn region of the Urals. Banned as a ‘kulak’ from the kolkhoz in Fyodortsovo, Ivan’s father fled to Cherdyn and worked on the river barges transporting timber down to the pulp-and-paper mill at Krasnovishersk, where his brother and uncle were both in the labour camp. Ivan grew up with a strong desire to get on in life. His father was always telling him to learn a profession. ‘There was nothing where we lived, no industry at all,’ recalls Ivan. ‘My dream was to go to Perm, but that was far away, and I could not afford the fare… The main thing was to have a profession. Without that there was no future.’ The only place where he could study beyond the age of fourteen was the Factory Apprentice School (FZU) attached to the pulp-and-paper mill. All the teachers were former Vishlag prisoners, as Ivan recalls:

  They were engineers, specialists in their professions, brought from the camp to train us in paper production and electrical work. I trained as an electrician, and then worked at the paper mill. I could get work in any town and any factory, because in those years there was a huge demand for skilled workers like myself. I even went to Perm and worked there on the landings for the river-boats… I was proud of my success. My parents were proud of me as well.60

  Millions of peasant sons were coming to the towns and forging a new identity for themselves. Between 1928 and 1932 the urban population grew at the extraordinary rate of 50,000 people every week. The population of the cities grew too fast for the state to cope with the rising demand for consumer goods, which were low on the list of Soviet priorities for the Five Year Plan, so after 1928 rationing was introduced for foodstuffs, fuel and various household items. With private trade repressed, the streets turned grey, restaurants and cafés disappeared, shop windows emptied, and people dressed more shabbily. Alexandre Barmine, a Soviet diplomat who returned to Moscow in the summer of 1930, after four years abroad, recalled feeling shocked by the economic hardship he discovered in the capital:

  The Uglitskikh family (Ivan standing at the back), Cherdyn, 1938

  After the improvements of 1922–28, Moscow showed appalling changes. Every face and every house front was eloquent of misery, exhaustion, and apathy. There were scarcely any stores, and the rare display windows still existing had an air of desolation. Nothing was to be seen in them but cardboard boxes and food tins, upon which the shopkeepers, in a mood of despair rather than rashness, had pasted stickers reading ‘empty’. Everyone’s clothes were worn out, and the quality of the stuff was unspeakable. My Paris suit made me feel embarrassed. There was a shortage of everything – especially of soap, boots, vegetables, meat, butter and all fatty foodstuffs.61

  The housing situation was desperate. In 1928, the Soviet city dweller had on average 5.8 square metres of living space, but many of the poorest workers had no more than a couple of square metres they could call their own. An American describes the conditions in which many Moscow workers lived:

  Kuznetsov lived with about 550 others, men and women, in a wooden structure about 800 feet long and fifteen feet wide. The room contained approximately 500 narrow beds, covered with mattresses filled with straw or dried leaves. There were no pillows, or blankets… Some of the residents had no beds and slept on the floor or in wooden boxes. In some cases beds were used by one shift and by others at night. There were no screens or walls to give any privacy… There were no closets or wardrobes, because each one owned only the clothing on his back.62

  Many workers from peasant families had little expectation of private space. Back in the village, families traditionally ate together from a common bowl and slept together on benches by the stove. Still, for many it must have been a shock to share their living space with other families when they moved into the towns.

  Nadezhda Pukhova was born in 1912 to a large peasant family in Pskov province. In 1929, she ran away from the kolkhoz and came to Kolpino, a large industrial suburb of Leningrad, where she found a job at the Izhora machine-building plant. Nadezhda rented the corner of a ground-floor room in a wooden house, not far from the factory. It was a large and draughty room, heated by a primus stove, with a kitchen-toilet and its own side-entrance from the yard. Nadezhda met her husband Aleksandr at the house. He was the eldest son of a peasant family in the Rybinsk region of Iaroslavl province and had recently arrived in Kolpino to take up an apprenticeship as a garage mechanic. The owner of the house was a distant relative, who let Aleksandr rent a corner in the upstairs room. After they were married, Aleksandr moved downstairs to live with Nadezhda on the ground floor. The couple rigged up a curtain round their bed to give them some privacy from the other families. In all there were sixteen people living in the room, including a prostitute, who brought clients back at night, and a fireman, who got up at 4 a.m. to go to work. ‘We slept badly,’ recalls Nadezhda. ‘The fireman, who slept in the next bed to us, would get up in the night and light a match to see what time it was. Men were always coming in and out with Olga [the prostitute]. She said that she would kill us if we reported her. People’s nerves wore very thin.’ During the winter Aleksandr’s relatives from Iaroslavl would stay with them. They came in search of factory work, or to sell felt boots they made to supplement their income from the kolkhoz. ‘They all came – aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers with their wives,’ recalls Nadezhda.

  I was shocked by the way they lived – it was so dirty and primitive. It was not like that in Pskov, where my parents’ house was always very clean. Aleksandr’s relatives slept on the floor – the women with blankets, the men with just their tunics to keep them warm. They made the room smell like horses.63

  The Golovins also followed the route of migration to town. In February 1933, Nikolai was finally released from the Solovetsky labour camp. Warned not to join Yevdokiia and his children in Shaltyr, where he might be rearrested, he made his way to Pestovo, a small town near Vologda, where he managed to find work as a carpenter on a building site. Like many provincial towns in the early 1930s, Pestovo was full of ‘kulak’ runaways. Among them was Yevdokiia’s brother, Ivan Sobolev, a former priest who had changed his name and begun working as an accountant in the logging industry, after the Bolsheviks closed down his village church. Nikolai became the leader of his work brigade on the construction site and moved into a tiny wooden cabin that had been abandoned by a forester. Gradually, the family was reunited. Nikolai, the son, came to Pestovo from the White Sea Canal – one of the 12,000 prisoners released as a reward for their hard work on the canal’s completion in August 1933 – and joined his father’s work brigade. The other son, Ivan, who had run away from Obukhovo when they came to arrest the Golovins, also came to Pestovo after years of wandering around Siberia. He too joined his father’s work brigade. Maria, the daughter, who had also fled Obukhovo, arrived next, in 1934. She had been so frightened by her three years on the run as a ‘kulak’ daughter that she changed her name and married a Bolshevik worker, who beat her and renounced her when he found out her true identity. Finally, in December 1934, after several months of writing petitions to the NKVD in Ustiuzh, Nikolai was reunited with his wife Yevdokiia and the
ir three other children, Antonina, Tolia and Aleksei, who returned safely from the ‘special settlement’. The woodsman’s cabin, which Nikolai had made into a home, was very small, but to Antonina, who had spent three years in the barracks at Shaltyr, it seemed like a paradise:

  There was just one little room. Inside it was an iron bed – the very one that our neighbour Puzhinin had saved for us when we were deported from our home – the bed in which our parents slept and where we, their children, had all been born. It was our bed, unmistakably, it had the same nickel-plated spheres on the bedposts, the same mattress. It was the one thing we had left from our old life.64

  The bed from the Golovin household in Obukhovo (photographed in Pestovo in 2005). It is more ordinary than the legendary bed Antonina recalls from her childhood

  4

  On 3 September 1932, two boys were found dead in a forest near the village of Gerasimovka in western Siberia. They had been stabbed to death by their own relatives, it was reported in the press, because Pavlik, the older boy, who was fifteen and an active member of the Pioneers, had denounced his father, Trofim Morozov, as a ‘kulak’ to the Soviet police. The rest of the Morozovs had taken their revenge. The true facts of the case are hard to disentangle from the web of lies and political intrigue. From the start of the investigation, the murder was scripted by the Soviet press and the police as a political crime, with Pavlik in the role of a model Pioneer and his killers cast as ‘kulak counter-revolutionaries’.

  Gerasimovka was a remote village in the forest near Tavda, 350 kilometres north-east of Sverdlovsk in the Urals. It was surrounded by labour camps and ‘special settlements’. At night the villagers could hear the barking of guard dogs. Gerasimovka was a miserable place. The poorest peasants had one cow, the richest two. Only nine had a samovar. There was just one teacher in a rudimentary school, established as late as 1931, which had only thirteen books. Like much of the peasantry in western Siberia, the villagers of Gerasimovka were fiercely independent. They had moved east from central Russia to win their land and freedom in the nineteenth century and were not about to give that up by joining the collective farms. None of the households in the village had signed up for the kolkhoz in August 1931; little wonder the Soviet press described the place as a ‘kulak nest’.65

  Trofim Morozov was a sober and hard-working peasant of average means who had been wounded twice whilst fighting for the Red Army in the Civil War. He commanded respect among his fellow villagers and was serving his third term as chairman of the village Soviet in the autumn of 1931, when it was brought to the attention of OGPU that he was selling false papers to the ‘kulak’ exiles in the ‘special settlements’. His son may have been the informant. Contrary to the propaganda of the Soviet press, Pavlik was not in fact a Pioneer (there was no Pioneer organization in Gerasimovka) but he clearly wanted to be one, and after the opening of the school he became active in agitation work, which brought him close to the police. In Gerasimovka Pavlik had the reputation of someone who informed on neighbours when they did something wrong (years later the villagers recalled him as a ‘rotten kid’). He bore a grudge against his father, who had abandoned the family home for another woman, leaving Pavlik, as the eldest son, to look after his mother Tatiana, an illiterate peasant woman who appears to have been mentally unbalanced by the departure of Trofim and may have encouraged Pavlik to report him in a fit of jealousy. According to the press reports of Trofim’s trial in the village school in November 1931, Pavlik denounced his father’s crimes, and when Trofim shouted out, ‘It’s me, your father,’ the boy told the judge: ‘Yes, he used to be my father, but I no longer consider him my father. I am not acting as a son, but as a Pioneer.’ Trofim was sentenced to a labour camp in the Far North and later shot.66

  Emboldened by his appearance in the trial, Pavlik began to inform on villagers who concealed grain or spoke out against the kolkhoz. He was helped by his younger brother Fyodor, who was then aged nine. The villagers were enraged by the boys’ activities. Sergei Morozov, Pavlik’s grandfather, barred them from his house, and other members of the family tried to stop them from reporting to the police. But there is no evidence that the family was involved in the murder of the boys, which was probably the work of teenagers, including Pavlik’s cousin, Danila, following a squabble over a harness and a gun.67

  Once the murder was reported in the local press, the investigation was immediately politicized. Danila was leaned upon to denounce Sergei, his own grandfather, as the murderer. The denunciation was supported by two other members of the family: Tatiana, who was ready to blame anyone for the murder of her sons; and Pavlik’s cousin, Ivan Potupchik, an ardent Stalinist and police aide, who was rewarded for his role in the affair by promotion to the Party’s ranks. In the end, five members of the Morozov ‘kulak clan’ were put on trial in November 1932: Pavlik’s uncle and godfather, who were accused of plotting the murder; his grandfather and cousin Danila, who were said to have carried it out; and his grandmother, who was supposed to have lured the boys into the woods. Their guilt was taken as proven from the start of this show trial (the prosecutors cited Stalin’s speeches on the intensification of the class struggle in the countryside to demonstrate the murderers’ political motives). Four of the five – all except Pavlik’s uncle for some incomprehensible reason – were sentenced to ‘the highest measure of punishment’ – execution by a firing squad.68

  By this stage, the national press had drawn its own conclusions. In its version Gerasimovka was an emblem of backward peasant Russia, and the Morozovs an archetype of the patriarchal ‘kulak’ family, which collectivization would sweep away. Pavlik soon became the hero of a propaganda cult, launched in the autumn of 1933, when Gorky called for the building of a monument to the young martyr, who, the writer said, had ‘understood that a relative by blood may also be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared’.69 The cult was everywhere. Stories, films, poems, plays, biographies and songs all portrayed Pavlik as a perfect Pioneer, a loyal vigilante of the Party in the home. His selfless courage, which he had displayed by sacrificing his own father, was promoted as an example for all Soviet schoolchildren. The cult had a huge impact on the moral norms and sensibilities of a whole generation of children, who learned from Pavlik that loyalty to the state was a higher virtue than family love and other personal ties. Through the cult the idea was sown in millions of minds that snitching on one’s friends and relatives was not shameful but public-spirited. It was indeed expected of the Soviet citizen.70

  Who was most affected by this lesson of the Morozov tale? Few children in stable families where moral principles were clearly set by the parents, as far as one can tell from interviews, although on this awkward issue, which today is understood in the context of the Terror, memory is unreliable. But Pavlik was, it seems, a positive example for many people who had grown up in unstable or oppressive families, where the influence of the elders was too weak to counteract the ideas of the Soviet regime. The propagandists of the cult were typical in this respect. Pavel Solomein, for example, the Sverdlovsk journalist who first brought Pavlik’s story to the attention of the Soviet public in the press, had run away from his brutal stepfather when he was a child and had grown up in a series of orphanages. Gorky was on his own from the age of nine, when he was expelled from his grandfather’s house – a place of cruelty and backwardness where the men took to the bottle and the women found solace in God – to fend for himself in the industrial towns of the Volga. For many people from unhappy backgrounds such as this, Pavlik was a hero because he had freed himself from the ‘darkness’ of his family’s way of life; by developing his own political consciousness and becoming active in the public sphere, he had found a higher form of ‘family’ in the Pioneers, who were marching with the Party and the Soviet people to a ‘light and radiant future’. Pavlik’s story had a strong appeal for orphans in particular. Untouched by the influence of family life, they could not understand what the boy had done wrong by denouncing his own fath
er. Brought up by the state, they were indoctrinated to be loyal and grateful to it for saving them from destitution, which they were told awaited orphans who had not been lucky enough to have been born in the Soviet Union, the greatest country in the world.

  Mikhail Nikolaev was three years old in 1932, when his parents were arrested and he was sent to an orphanage and given a new name. He never found out what his real name was, nor the names of his parents, nor who they were, why they were arrested, or what had happened to them after their arrest. It was a policy in children’s homes to remould children like Mikhail as ‘Soviet citizens’ by erasing their original identity. As a boy, Mikhail was deeply influenced by the tale of Pavlik Morozov, which was drummed into orphans from an early age. He thought of Pavlik as a ‘real hero’, and dreamed of emulating his achievement by ‘discovering a spy’. Looking back on his childhood, Mikhail suspected he would have thought differently about his boyhood hero, had he grown up in a family:

  We orphans had an impoverished understanding of life compared with normal children. We were deprived of family events, of conversations around the kitchen table – of all that unofficial and, in my view, most important information that forms a person’s understanding of life and his relation to the world. Our ‘window on the world’ was the classroom, the Pioneers, the radio in the red corner, and [the newspaper] ‘Pioneer’s Truth’ (Pionerskaia Pravda). All the information from these sources was the same, and there was only one way to interpret it.71