The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  The popularity of Pavlik’s story, especially among the young, reinforced a profound cultural and generation gap – between the old world of the patriarchal village and the new urban world of the Soviet regime – which divided many families. The rural population was increasingly young and literate. According to the census of 1926, 39 per cent of the rural population was under fifteen years of age (and more than half aged less than twenty) while peasant sons in their early twenties were more than twice as likely to be literate than their fathers (peasant women of the same age were five times more likely to be literate than their mothers). Educated in Soviet schools, these younger peasants no longer shared the attitudes and beliefs of their parents. Through the Pioneers and the Komsomol many of them found the confidence to break away from their control. They would refuse to go to church, to wear a cross, or to observe religious rituals, often citing Soviet power as the new authority in such matters, which sometimes led to arguments with their parents. They looked increasingly towards the cities for their information and values, and as the popular culture of the towns spread to remote villages in the 1920s and 1930s, more and more rural youth came to prefer the towns to the countryside. Its effect was to encourage rural children to regard the towns as a better and more cultured way of life than the countryside. A survey of the Komsomol in one of the most agricultural districts of Voronezh province during the mid-1920s found that 85 per cent of its members came from peasant families: yet only 3 per cent said that they wanted to work in agriculture. Most rural children wanted to leave the countryside and go off to the city for a shop or office job, to study in colleges and enter the industrial professions, or to join the military.72

  The Medvedev family was torn apart by this division between the young and old. Andrei Medvedev was born in 1880 in the village of Oblovka, on the railway line between Tambov and Balashov, 570 kilometres south-east of Moscow. A blacksmith by trade, he made a living in the winter from fixing metal roofs on the houses of the wealthier peasants, but in the summer he worked with his five brothers on the family farm of his father, Fyodor, in whose household all seventeen Medvedevs lived. Fyodor was a peasant patriarch, devoutly Orthodox, with long white hair down to his shoulders, who ruled his household in the old-fashioned way. ‘We lived by the customs of ancient times,’ recalls one of his granddaughters. ‘Everybody ate from the same bowl, and my grandfather gave the sign for all of us to start by knocking with his spoon on the side of the bowl. No one said a word unless he spoke.’

  In 1923, Andrei married Alyona, a young woman half his age, who had fled with her relatives from hungry Petrograd to the Tambov countryside in 1917. Alyona came from a poor family of labourers. Her father was a railway porter who was left with seven children when his wife died; in Tambov they had eked out a living doing jobs on peasant farms. Andrei brought his young wife into Fyodor’s home, and in 1924, their daughter Nina was born. From the start Alyona found it hard to submit to the patriarchal customs of the household. Although she had just three years of schooling, Alyona became the village Soviet’s secretary. She organized a school and taught the village children – and many of its adults – how to read. Andrei was not interested in books – there were none in the Medvedev home – so she brought home books and magazines from the local market town from which the children learned to read. In 1928, Alyona’s school became a ‘liquidation point’ (likpunkt) in the Komsomol campaign for the liquidation of illiteracy (likbez), which was part of the Soviet campaign against religion and the patriarchal culture of the countryside. Alyona became an activist in Zhenotdel, the Women’s Department of the Party, which often took her off to conferences in the district town. Appalled by Alyona’s independence, Fyodor threatened to expel her from the house and often argued with his son, one of the leaders of the village Soviet, who supported his wife’s activities, even though he was himself a jealous type and did not like her going on her own to town.

  In September 1929, a kolkhoz was formed in Oblovka. Only twenty-nine of the sixty-seven households in the village had agreed to join it, but this was deemed enough to force it through. Andrei was elected the chairman of the kolkhoz. But Fyodor refused to join. His cow had given birth to a new calf, which he did not want to give up. Father and son argued violently. ‘They would have killed each other, if my mother had not intervened,’ recalls Nina. ‘They cursed each other and vowed to go their separate ways.’ The household farm was split. Andrei moved with his share of its property to the kolkhoz, while Fyodor, at the age of eighty-one, continued farming on his own. Four months later, the old man was arrested as a ‘kulak’ – one of twelve ‘kulaks’ arrested in Oblovka, all on the basis of a report by the village Soviet. Fyodor’s house was smashed to bits, and he was exiled to Siberia. But the family drama did not end there. As the chairman of the kolkhoz, Andrei had tied his future to the countryside, but Alyona was drawn towards the towns, largely in the hope of finding a cure for her daughter Nina, who had been blinded by illness and needed special care. In April 1930, Alyona left Andrei and returned with Nina to her family in Leningrad, where they rented a tiny corner in a room owned by friends of relatives. ‘We had only four square metres,’ recalls Nina, ‘just enough for a narrow bed with a bedside table and two little chairs, on which I slept, while Mama occupied the bed.’ For two years the family was split, but then, in October 1932, Andrei, too, came to Leningrad. The pull of family had proved stronger than his commitment to the collective farm. The Medvedevs moved to a larger room in the city centre, Alyona taught at Nina’s school, and Andrei worked as a roofer in the works department of OGPU.73

  Many families succumbed to the twin pressures of collectivization and urbanization, as the Medvedevs did. Collectivization was only the last in a whole series of social cataclysms for the Russian peasantry – among them the Great War, the Revolution, the Civil War and the famine, which destroyed millions – but, in a way, it was the most traumatic because it divided families, setting sons against their fathers, over whether to embrace the Soviet way of life. How many sons actually denounced their own fathers is hard to say. There were certainly a few, if not quite as many as one might believe from the Soviet press, which gave the impression in the 1930s that the countryside was full of real-life Pavlik Morozovs. The press reported that a Pioneer called Sorokin had caught his father stealing kolkhoz grain and had him arrested by the police; that a schoolboy called Seryozha Fadeyev had told his headmaster where his father had concealed a store of potatoes; and that a thirteen-year-old boy called Pronia Kolibin had denounced his own mother for stealing grain from the kolkhoz fields (he was rewarded with a trip to Artek, the famous Pioneer holiday camp in the Crimea, while his mother was sent to a labour camp).74

  The Pioneers encouraged children to emulate Pavlik Morozov by informing on their parents. Pioneer brigades were commonly employed to watch the kolkhoz fields and report on peasants stealing grain. Pionerskaia Pravda printed names of young informers and listed their accomplishments. At the height of the Pavlik Morozov cult in the 1930s, the true Pioneer was almost expected to prove his worthiness by denouncing his own relatives. One provincial journal warned that Pioneers who failed to inform on their families should be treated with suspicion and, if found to be lacking vigilance, should be denounced themselves. In this climate it is not surprising that parents were afraid to speak in the presence of their own children. As one doctor recalled:

  I never spoke against Stalin to my boy. After the story of Pavlik Morozov you were afraid to drop any kind of unguarded word, even in front of your own son, because he might inadvertently mention it in school, the directorate would report it, and they would ask the boy, ‘Where did you hear that?’ and the boy would answer, ‘Papa says so and Papa is always right,’ and before you knew it, you’d be in serious trouble.75

  One man who got into serious trouble was the father of Aleksandr Marian. Aleksandr was a leader of the Komsomol in his native village of Malaeshty, near Tiraspol in south-west Ukraine. In 1932, when he was seventeen, he denounce
d his father Timofei in a letter to the police. Aleksandr was a fanatical supporter of collectivization, welcoming the war against the ‘kulaks’, whom he described in his diary on 8 June 1931 as ‘the last but biggest class of exploiters in the USSR’. Timofei did not agree. He was critical of collectivization, and said so to his son, who promptly denounced him. Timofei was arrested and sent to a labour camp. In his diary, in October 1933, Aleksandr reported an exchange with a comrade in the Komsomol who claimed that he should be deprived of the leadership on account of his father’s ‘counterrevolutionary’ views. Aleksandr wrote:

  I had to explain to the comrade that my father was arrested on my demand. The reason for his falling into an anti-Soviet position was his experience in Austria as a prisoner of war [in the First World War]… He returned with a love of Austrian order, convinced that the bourgeois smallholdings which he had seen in Austria were the key to agricultural wealth… The mistakes of the first period of collectivization he saw simply as chaos, not as a temporary complication. If only he had known the laws of the dialectic, if only he had been politically literate, he would have recognized the error of his views and would have recanted them.76

  Such fanatically ideological denunciations were probably quite rare. More commonly, young people behaved reactively, renouncing family members rather than denouncing them, and even then, only after their relatives had been exposed as ‘enemies’. Indoctrinated by their schools and the Pioneers, they saw no point perhaps in harming their own prospects by not distancing themselves from family members who had, in any case, already been arrested. There were often complex pressures and considerations that affected such behaviour. People could be threatened with expulsion from the Pioneers and the Komsomol, or barred from colleges and professions, unless they proved their Soviet loyalty and vigilance by renouncing their arrested relatives. This accounts for the formulaic notices printed in their thousands in the Soviet press:

  I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them that God exists, and that is the reason I am severing all my relations with him.77

  Some of these renunciations may have been encouraged by the parents themselves, who recognized the need for their children to break from them, if they were to advance in Soviet society. In 1932, for example, a sixteen-year-old boy from a traditional Jewish household near Kremenchug wrote to the local Yiddish-language newspaper renouncing his family’s backward ways:

  I refuse to be part of this family any longer. I feel that my real father is the Komsomol, who taught me the important things in life. My real mother is our motherland; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the people of the USSR are my family now.

  According to his younger sister, who was later interviewed, the boy had written this renunciation on his father’s insistence. ‘When I was fourteen,’ the girl recalls,

  my father called me and my brother into a room and explained that his way of life was not appropriate for modern times. He did not want us to repeat his mistakes, such as observing Jewish religious traditions. He said we had to go to the editor of a school wall-newspaper and announce there that we were now living a new life and that we did not want to have anything in common with the religious past of our father. My father made us do this. He said it meant nothing to him, but he thought this action would open up a brighter future for us.78

  Other factors, too, not least ambition, led young people to renounce their relatives. Many of these public letters of renunciation were written on the eve of leaving home for universities or careers in the towns; they were a declaration of a new identity, a commitment to Soviet dreams and goals. The early 1930s were a period of enormous opportunity and social mobility: workers’ sons and daughters aspired to become professionals; peasant children dreamed of coming to the towns. All these ambitions were purposefully fuelled by Soviet propaganda, which placed the cult of personal success at the centre of the Five Year Plan. Films, books and songs featured the exploits of ‘ordinary heroes’ from the proletariat – engineers and scientists, model workers, aviators and explorers, ballerinas, sportsmen and women – who were all bringing glory to the Soviet Union. Young people were encouraged to believe that they could emulate their achievements, provided they worked hard and proved themselves as worthy Soviet citizens.

  Such ambitions were often held most dearly by the children of ‘kulaks’ and other ‘enemies’ of the Soviet regime – a paradox that stands at the centre of the conflict between ‘kulak’ fathers and their sons. Growing up with the stigma of their origins, they wanted to be recognized as equal members of society, which could only be achieved by breaking with the past. Some renounced their ‘kulak’ relatives; others erased them from their biography or claimed that they were ‘dead’, or had ‘run away’. Such acts of denial were often necessary for survival. Yet the memory of them can still evoke feelings of remorse and shame, not because these young people had actually denounced anyone, but because they lived relatively ‘normal’ lives and pursued careers while their parents disappeared in the Gulag. They had reconciled themselves to the Soviet system and had found their place in it, even though they knew that the system had destroyed their own family.

  No one expressed these feelings of remorse more powerfully than the poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky. He was born in 1910 in the village of Zagore, in Smolensk province, where his father, Trifon, a blacksmith, made a comfortable but modest living for his wife and seven children. Aleksandr was a teenage Communist. He joined the Komsomol in 1924 and became an activist in the village. He often argued about politics with his father and twice ran away from home, unable to reconcile himself to his family’s peasant way of life. In 1927, he joined the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), moved to Smolensk, and published his first poem, ‘To a Father and Rich Man’ (‘Ottsu-bogateiu’) in the Komsomol newspaper Young Comrade:

  In your home there is no shortage,

  You are rich – and I know this,

  Of all the five-walled peasant houses,

  The best is yours.79

  In the spring of 1930, the authorities imposed a heavy tax on Trifon’s family. Fearing arrest, Trifon ran away to the Donbass in search of work, followed in the autumn by his sons Ivan (then aged seventeen) and Konstantin (twenty-two), who reckoned they would ease their mother’s burden by going off in search of their father. Ivan returned that winter, only to discover that he had been barred from the village school as a ‘kulak’ son. In March 1931, the Tvardovsky family – with the exception of Aleksandr – was deported from Zagore. Konstantin (who had been imprisoned in Smolensk) and Trifon (arrested on his return from the Donbass) joined their convoy on its way to the Urals. The family spent the next two years in and out of labour camps and ‘special settlements’, living on the run, picking up odd jobs in factories and mines wherever they could find a loophole in the passport system, splitting up and reuniting, until the autumn of 1932, when Trifon found work as a blacksmith in a factory in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil.

  All this time, Aleksandr was studying at the Pedagogical Institute in Smolensk, where he was making a name for himself as a young poet. In his first long poem, The Road to Socialism (1931), he gave a glowing picture of life on the collective farms. He spoke in favour of the campaign against the ‘kulaks’ at student meetings at the institute. But he clearly felt uneasy about the way in which his family had been treated, because in the spring of 1931, he went to see the regional Party secretary, I. P. Rumiantsev, in the hope that he might intervene to ease their lot. Rumiantsev said, recalled Tvardovsky in 1954, that ‘in life there were moments when one had to choose between one’s family and the Revolution’. After this meeting, Tvardovsky was singled out as a ‘waverer’. His loyalty was tested by the Soviet authorities. At literary meetings he was attacked as a ‘kulak’ son. He only escaped expulsion after a courageous and vigorous defence by the local writer Adrian Makedonov (who was later arrested).80

  Afraid for his career, Tvardovsky dis
tanced himself from his family. In the spring of 1931, his parents wrote to him from the ‘special settlement’ at Lialia in the Urals. They did not expect him to help them with money – they knew that he had none, recalled Ivan in 1988: ‘they simply hoped that he might want to keep in touch with his own mother and father, and with his brothers and sisters’. Ivan takes up the story:

  Aleksandr wrote back twice. In the first letter he promised to do something. But a second letter soon arrived. It contained these lines, which I cannot forget: ‘My dears! I am neither a barbarian nor an animal. I ask you to fortify yourselves, to be patient and to work. The liquidation of the kulaks as a class does not mean the liquidation of people, even less the liquidation of children…’ Later on there was the phrase: ‘… I cannot write to you… do not write to me.’

  When this letter was read to Ivan’s mother, she

  bowed her head and sat down on a bench, where she lost herself in thoughts, which she spoke out loud, although what she said was not for us, but for herself, to reassure herself of her son’s love and devotion.

  ‘I know, I feel, I believe… that it was hard for him,’ she said. ‘My son, surely, had no choice. Life is like a carousel. What can you do?’81

  Two months later, in August 1931, Trifon took his youngest son Pavlik and ran away from Lialia, where the rest of the family remained. After a month they reached Smolensk and searched for Aleksandr at the House of Soviets, where they knew that he was working in the editorial offices. Trifon asked the guard to call his son:

  I knew what he had written to us at Lialia, but I reasoned: he is my son! He might at least take care of Pavlushka [Pavlik]. What harm had the boy done him, his own brother? Aleksandr came out. God forbid, how can it be that a meeting with a son can be so frightening! I looked at him in a state of near panic: he was all grown up, slender and handsome! His father’s son! He stood there and looked at us in silence. And then he said, not ‘Hello, father’, but ‘How did you get here?’