The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  ‘Shura [Aleksandr]! My son!’ I said. ‘We are dying there! From hunger, illness, arbitrary punishments!’

  ‘So you ran away?’ he asked abruptly, not, it seemed, in his own voice. And his look was different too, it fixed me to the ground.

  I remained silent – what could I say? Let it be that way – I was only sorry for Pavlushka. He was just a boy who had come in hope of his brother’s love, and it had turned out so differently!

  ‘I can only help by sending you back, free of charge, to the place where you came from!’ – those were Aleksandr’s precise words.

  I realized that there was no point in asking, begging, any more. I simply asked him to wait while I went to a friend in Stolpovo, who owed me money, and then, when I returned, he could do what he liked with me. He was visibly shaken.

  ‘All right, go,’ he said.

  At Stolpovo Trifon went to see his friend. They drank together, while Pavlik slept. Then at midnight, the police arrived to arrest Trifon. Aleksandr had betrayed him.82

  Four years passed before Aleksandr saw or heard from his family again. During this time, Ivan believes, Aleksandr poured his guilt feelings into his unpublished poetry:

  What are you, brother?

  How are you, brother?

  Where are you, brother?

  On what Belomorkanal?

  (‘Brothers’, 1933)

  In 1935, Ivan went to visit Aleksandr in Smolensk. Having fled the ‘special settlement’, Ivan had spent the past three years living on the run, taking casual jobs in Moscow and other industrial towns, but he yearned to see his native town and he felt the time had come to let his brother know what had happened to his family. The brothers had two brief meetings, at which Aleksandr warned his brother to leave Smolensk: ‘There is nothing for you here,’ he told Ivan. ‘You will find nothing but unpleasantness. For me, by contrast, it is important to live here, where people know me well!’83

  At the time, Ivan was full of bitterness towards his brother. But in later years he came to understand the pressures on Aleksandr, his need to remain in a place where people knew and respected him, and where his success offered some protection. Reflecting on his brother’s choices, Ivan wrote with compassion:

  Aleksandr Tvardovsky, 1940

  I dare say that my visit stirred up guilt feelings and remorse in him. He couldn’t have forgotten the letters he wrote to us in exile, nor his meeting with father at the House of Soviets. I felt sorry for my brother. Whether I liked it or not, I had to recognize that he was a sincere member of the Komsomol and had been so since the 1920s. I now think that Aleksandr saw the revolutionary violence that swept away our parents, brothers and sisters, although unjust and mistaken, as a kind of test, to see if he could prove himself as a true member of the Komsomol. Maybe there was nobody he had to prove this to – maybe he just had to prove it to himself. No doubt he rationalized it in this way: ‘Every kulak is somebody’s father, and his children someone’s brothers and sisters. What makes my family any different? Be brave and strong, don’t give in to abstract humanitarianism and other feelings outside class interests.’ This was his logic: if you support collectivization, that means you support the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, and you do not have the moral right to ask for an exception for your own father. It is possible that in his heart Aleksandr mourned for his family, but it was just one of many kulak families.84

  5

  The ‘great break’ of 1928–32 destroyed old ties and loyalties uniting families and communities. It gave birth to a new kind of society in which people were defined by their relation to the state. In this system social class was everything; the state promoted ‘proletarians’ and repressed the ‘bourgeoisie’. But class was not a fixed or rigid category. As millions of people left their homes, changed their jobs or moved around the country, it was relatively easy to change or reinvent one’s social class. People learned to fashion for themselves a class identity that would help them advance. They became clever at concealing or disguising impure social origins, and at dressing up their own biographies to make them seem more ‘proletarian’.

  The notion of ‘working on the self’ was commonplace among the Bolsheviks. It was central to the Bolshevik idea of creating a higher type of human personality (the New Soviet Man) by purging from oneself the ‘petty-bourgeois’ and individualistic impulses inherited from the old society. As one Party leader wrote in 1929: ‘We are all people of the past with all the drawbacks from the past, and a great deal of work should be done on all of us. We must all work on ourselves.’85 At the same time, the ability of people to change and manipulate their class identity was a cause of great concern to the Party leadership.86 It was widely feared that the ‘proletariat’ – the imagined social base of the dictatorship – would become ‘diluted’ by the mass influx of the ruined peasantry and other ‘petty-bourgeois types’ (‘kulaks’, traders, priests, etc.) into the towns; that the Party would be swamped by ‘self-seekers’ and adventurers who had managed to conceal their impure social origins.

  There were lots of stories about such impostors in the Soviet press. The most famous was Vladimir Gromov, who in 1935 was sentenced to ten years of penal labour on the White Sea Canal for assuming the identity of a skilled engineer and prize-winning architect. Gromov had used forged papers to get high-paid jobs and a prestigious Moscow flat. He even managed to persuade the People’s Commissar for Supply, Anastas Mikoian, to give him an advance of a million roubles.87 The concern with impostors betrayed a profound anxiety within the Party leadership. It influenced the culture of the purge, whose violent rhetoric of denunication was based on the rationale of exposing the true identity of ‘hidden enemies’. Throughout the 1930s the Party leadership encouraged the popular belief that colleagues, neighbours, even friends and relatives, might not be what they appeared to be – a belief that did much to poison personal relationships and fuel the mass terror of 1937–8. ‘Look at what those enemies of the people are like,’ Elena Bonner’s younger brother said on the arrest of their father. ‘Some of them even pretend to be fathers.’88

  As with collectivization, the launching of the Five Year Plan was accompanied by a massive social purge of ‘class enemies’ and other ‘alien elements’ to remove all potential opposition and dissent. With the introduction of the passport system, the police was instructed to step up its campaign to exclude from the towns the ‘socially impure’ – ‘kulaks’, priests, merchants, criminals, ‘parasites’ and prostitutes, gypsies and other ethnic groups (Finns, Koreans, Volga Germans, and so on).89 Fear of social exclusion drove millions of people to conceal their origins. For while the ideology theoretically allowed for self-transformation, the process could be long and uncertain. Concealment could seem the more reliable, certainly the shorter, path toward social acceptance. In the chaos of the early 1930s it was relatively easy to change one’s identity by simply moving to another town, or by getting new papers. False papers could be easily obtained through bribery, or bought from forgers, who were found in every market town. But it was not even necessary to pay for a clean biography. Many people simply threw away their old papers and applied for new ones from a different Soviet, giving different information about their background and sometimes even changing their names and place of birth.90 In the provinces Soviet officials and police were notoriously inefficient and corrupt.

  For women, marriage was another way to cover up their social origins. Anna Dubova was born in 1916 to a large peasant family in Smolensk province. Her father was arrested as a ‘kulak’ in 1929 and later sent to work on a construction site in Podolsk, just south of Moscow, where his wife and children moved with him. Anna’s mother got a job at a rabbit farm, while Anna enrolled at a factory school (FZU) attached to a bakery. Just when they thought that they were on their way to becoming ‘normal’ people once again, the family was denounced for concealing its ‘kulak’ origins by a friend of Anna’s sister from the Komsomol. The Dubovs were deported. They lost all their possessions and rights of r
esidence. Anna’s parents went with their younger children to Rzhev, 200 kilometres east of Moscow, where they lived in ‘some kind of shed’ belonging to her father’s relatives. Anna fled to Moscow, where another sister, who was married to a Muscovite, gave her a place to sleep on the floor of their tiny room. Without a residence permit, living illegally, Anna nevertheless pursued her ambitions. After graduating from the FZU, she became a pastry cook at the Bolshevik Cake Factory, where she specialized in decorating cakes. Her future began to seem bright. But there was always the danger that she would lose everything if her ‘kulak’ origins and illegal status were exposed. ‘All this time,’ she said in interviews in the 1990s:

  I was afraid whenever I saw a policeman, because it seemed to me that he could tell that something about me wasn’t right. And I got married just so that I could cover up my background… My husband was from the bednota [the poor peasantry]. He was a member of the Komsomol and the secretary of a village Soviet not far from Moscow. As a member of the Komsomol it was his job to identify and dispossess kulaks… My marriage was a kind of camouflage. I had no place to live, but once I was married we had a little room to ourselves. And when I went to bed, I would think to myself, Dear Lord, I’m in my very own bed.

  Anna’s husband was a kind man but he drank a lot. ‘I kept dreaming, “Lord, if only I could marry a decent sort of fellow.” I lived with him, but I dreamed about a decent husband, even though I had already given birth to our daughter.’91

  People forced to live this double life were haunted by the threat of exposure. ‘I was in a constant state of fear,’ recalls a former secret police colonel, an exemplary Communist, who concealed his noble origins throughout his life. ‘I thought all the time, “Suppose it is suddenly discovered who I really am.” Then all I have worked for, all I have built for myself and my family, my life, my career will suddenly collapse.’ But fear was only one of a number of contradictory impulses and emotions – passivity, the desire to withdraw, shame, inferiority – which could give rise in the same person to both a secret hatred of the Soviet regime and a will to overcome one’s stigma by demonstrating devotion to the Soviet cause. People lost themselves in this duality. The inner self was swallowed up in the public personality. As one man recalled, ‘I began to feel that I was the man I had pretended to be.’92

  The young Simonov experienced something similar. Concealing his noble origins, he enrolled as a ‘proletarian’ in the factory school (FZU) in Saratov, where he studied to become a lathe-turner. Simonov had joined the factory school, against the wishes of his stepfather, who had wanted him to study at a higher institute or university – the educational trajectory typical of the old-world service class from which his parents came. But the teenage Simonov was excited by the vision of the new industrial society. He saw the proletariat as the new ruling class and wanted to join it. ‘It was the beginning of the Five Year Plan,’ recalls Simonov, ‘and I was swept along by its romantic spirit. I joined a club to discuss the Plan and its variants, which interested me far more than my studies at the secondary school. My stepfather was so cross that he barely spoke to me during my first year at the factory school.’93

  The atmosphere at the factory school was militantly proletarian. Half the students came from workers’ families and the other half from children’s homes. As the son of a princess, Simonov was dangerously out of place, but he did his best to look the part, giving up the shorts and sandals of his early teenage years and donning a worker’s tunic and peaked cap in an effort to fit in. At the core of Simonov’s attraction to the proletariat was the notion of the independence of the working man: ‘The life of a fully grown man, as I saw it, only started on the day he began to work and bring money home. I wanted to be independent and earn my own living as soon as possible.’94 Of course, by joining the army of industrial workers, Simonov would also become independent from his family, whose noble background was sure to hold him back.

  To support his studies at the factory school in Saratov, Simonov worked as an apprentice at the Universal Factory in the evenings. He assembled cartridges for the assault rifles produced by the huge munitions plant. By the spring of 1931, he was earning 15 roubles, a modest monthly wage, but an important contribution to the household budget, particularly after April, when his stepfather Aleksandr was arrested and Simonov became, at the age of fifteen, the sole breadwinner in the family.

  Simonov ‘the proletarian’, 1933

  The arrest was an orderly affair. The knock on the door came at ten o’clock in the evening. The family had already gone to bed, because Aleksandra had been feeling ill. Aleksandr would not let the police come into their barracks apartment until he had dressed. Konstantin awoke to find his stepfather reading the search warrant with a magnifying glass:

  The search went on for a long time; they conducted it properly, going methodically through everything in both rooms, even looking at my factory school notebook on the technology of metals, at my notebooks from the seventh class, and leafing through my mother’s huge trove of letters – she loved to write a lot and liked all her relatives and friends to write a lot to her… When the men finished the search, tidied up the papers and letters and, it seems to me – though I may be mistaken – made some sort of list of the confiscated things, I thought that was the end of it. But then one of them took a paper from his pocket and handed it to Father. It was a warrant for his arrest. At that moment I did not think, though I later realized, that the arrest had been planned from the very start, regardless of the results of the search. It was hard to look at Mother. Although she had a strong character, it was clear that she was ill, she’d sat up all night with a high temperature and she was shaking all over. Father was calm. Having read the paper – again inspecting it with his magnifying glass, which he took out from the pocket of his vest – and having made quite sure that it really was an order for arrest, he briefly kissed mother, and told her that he would return when the misunderstanding had been sorted out. Without saying a word, he shook my hand firmly and left with the men who had arrested him.95

  Like Aleksandr, Simonov believed that a misunderstanding had occurred. He must have known that many specialists had been arrested in Saratov, including several officers from the military school where his stepfather taught. But like most people who had lost a relative in the arrests, Simonov assumed that his stepfather had been arrested by mistake. ‘I thought that the others must be guilty of something, that they were enemies, but I did not connect them with my stepfather.’96 This distinction helped him to maintain his confidence in the Soviet system of justice, which was reinforced by the orderly behaviour of the OGPU officers, not just during the arrest of Aleksandr, but also during the arrest of his stepfather’s relative, Yevgeny Lebedev in Kremenchug, which Simonov had witnessed four years earlier.

  On Aleksandra’s orders, Simonov informed his teachers at the factory school about the arrest. Not to report it would be cowardly, she said. Simonov was not expelled from the school, but he was advised to postpone his application to the Komsomol until his stepfather was released. Aleksandra and her son were evicted from their small apartment in the barracks. All their belongings were thrown on to the street – a table with some stools, two bookcases, a wardrobe, a bed and a trunk for officers from the First World War with a hammock in which Simonov had slept. It was pouring with rain. Neighbours took in Aleksandra, who was running a fever, while her son walked around the outskirts of Saratov, looking for a place for them to live. Having found a room to rent, he got a lorry-driver to help them move their things. All his life he would recall this day – when he took charge of his family – as the moment when he came of age.

  I remember it without resentment, even with some measure of self-satisfaction, because I had proved that I could cope with anything. I had a sense of injury, but it was mainly for my mother… She could not forgive the people who were responsible for our eviction. No doubt it is because I felt her injury, when I was just a boy, that I still remember their names…97

>   Simonov’s response to his stepfather’s arrest was not to blame or question the Soviet regime, but to work even harder to support his family. Perhaps the arrest of his stepfather also reinforced his conviction that he needed to protect himself by strengthening his proletarian identity. Throughout that summer, Simonov continued to study in the day and to work by night at the factory. He was promoted to the second grade of apprentice workers and received a doubling of his wage, which was enough to support his mother and send two parcels every week to his stepfather in prison. Aleksandra earned some extra cash by teaching French and German at a secondary school. In the autumn Aleksandr was released from jail. ‘He hugged and kissed my mother. He even kissed me too, which was unusual,’ remembers Simonov. ‘Something in him had altered. At first I did not notice. But then I understood: his face was cold and white, not his usual sunburnt look.’98

  Aleksandr did not speak about the tortures he had suffered in the jail. The only thing he would say was that all the charges against him had been withdrawn, because he had refused to confess, even under ‘severe pressure’. As Simonov recalls, the lesson that he learned from this affair was all about the need to remain firm:

  Today [in 1978] I ask myself: did the events of that summer in Saratov leave any trace on my general approach to life, on my psychology as a fifteen– sixteen-year-old boy? Yes and no! With my stepfather things turned out as they should. He remained what he had always been – a model of clarity and conscientiousness – and the people who knew him were all convinced that he was innocent. And in those awful months, almost everybody with whom we had to deal was good to us – and that too was right, just what we would expect. Still, the story of my stepfather’s interrogation, which had ended as it should, because he was a very strong and solid person, left me with a feeling of unease, the feeling that a weaker person would have come out differently from this situation, because he would not have been able to withstand what he did. This alarming thought stayed in my mind… But above all, I sensed, perhaps unconsciously, that I had grown up, for I too had proved that I could cope in a crisis.99