The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  But worse was to come. In 1937, Sonia and Dolly were arrested and imprisoned in Orenburg. Sonia was shot, and Dolly later died in a labour camp. Only Liudmila survived. Looking back on these events in the last year of his life, Simonov recalled his reaction to the death of his favourite aunt:

  When I found out that she had been imprisoned, and then we ceased to hear from her, and then they told us that she had died – although not where or how – I remember experiencing this strong and painful feeling of injustice that was related entirely to her [Sonia], or most of all to her. The feeling would not leave my soul – I am not afraid to say this – and it stayed forever in my memory as the main injustice committed by the state, by Soviet power, against myself, personally. The feeling is particularly bitter because I know that, had Sonia been alive, she would have been the first person I would have helped when I was in a position to do so.

  Simonov’s regret was based on the awareness he gained in later years – the awareness that he had colluded in the system of repression that destroyed his aunts. Yet as he admits in his memoirs, at the time of their arrest his reaction had been different. He felt sorry for his aunts, but he found a way to rationalize and perhaps even justify their fates:

  I cannot remember what I thought about it then [in 1937], how I judged and explained to myself what had happened… I know that I could not have been unaffected, if only because I loved one of my aunts [Sonia] very much… But perhaps I thought: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ This acceptance seems much more cynical today than it felt then, when the Revolution, the breaking up of the old society, was still not so distant in people’s memories, and when it was rare to have a conversation without recourse to that phrase.101

  If Simonov’s encounter with the White Sea Canal brought him closer to the regime, for others it had the opposite effect. In 1929, Ilia Slavin, the former Zionist and a leading jurist at the Institute of Soviet Law in Moscow, was transferred to Leningrad to bolster the legal department of the Communist Academy. During the purges of that year the Law Department of Leningrad University had been closed down and its ‘bourgeois’ academics expelled. The legal department of the Communist Academy, which replaced it, was deemed in need of trusted Bolsheviks like Slavin to strengthen its resolve against the ‘bourgeois Rightists’ of the Soviet legal world whose presence was still felt in Leningrad.102 Slavin had become a major figure in the field of Soviet law. An adviser to the Commissariat of Justice, he was also a member of the commission that had written the Soviet Criminal Code of 1926, the first major overhaul of criminal law since 1917. In Leningrad the Slavins had two rooms in a large apartment which they shared with another family (in Moscow they had lived in a communal apartment shared by fifteen families). Eventually, they moved to a three-room flat in the House of the Leningrad Soviet, where many government workers, scientists and artists lived. ‘We were relatively privileged,’ recalls Ilia’s daughter Ida Slavina.

  My brother and his wife had their own room, my parents had another, where my father also worked, and I slept in the dining room. When there were guests I went to sleep in my parents’ room and then was moved to the divan in the dining room when my parents went to bed… But there was no hint of luxury – it was a Spartan, almost puritanical, way of life, entirely dedicated to the socialist ideals of my father… We shared our extra rations – of which father was ashamed – with our poorer friends and relatives… Books were our only luxury.103

  Slavin served his political patrons with a violent attack on the ‘bourgeois tendencies’ of a number of leading Soviet jurists in a book commissioned by the Communist Academy as part of the regime’s purge of the legal academic establishment in 1931. In this short but poisonous text, Sabotage on the Front of Soviet Criminal Law, Slavin compared the writings of several leading academic laywers in the 1920s with their writings before 1917 in order to expose what he claimed were their real but concealed ‘bourgeois’ views. Writing from political conviction, in the belief that the old legal thinking needed to be rooted out, Slavin denounced these jurists for attempting to subvert the basic ideological tenets of the Soviet legal system. He singled out for criticism the former Law Department at Leningrad University, which, he maintained, had been training ‘yesterday’s priests and White Guardists’ to pose as ‘the Marxists of today and the Communists of tomorrow’. Several of the jurists Slavin attacked were subsequently removed from their posts in the universities of Leningrad and Moscow, and forced to look for work in the provinces.104

  In the Slavin family archive there is a photograph of Ilia Slavin with his fellow teachers and some students at the Communist Academy in 1931. On the back it is inscribed: ‘To Comrade Slavin! In fond memory of you as a firm Communist of the Bolshevik guard, as our teacher, as a steadfast fighter on the ideological front, an iron broom purging vermin from the academic heights.’ For Ida Slavina it is hard to reconcile this description with her memory of her father as a soft and tender man. Perhaps Slavin was sucked into the system of repression because he was too weak to resist the demands of the Party. Maybe he felt vulnerable because of his previous involvement in the Zionist movement and wrote the book to prove his worthiness as a member of the ‘Bolshevik guard’. Or perhaps, as Ida thinks, he ‘lost his way’ because he was misled by his beliefs.

  Slavin believed in perekovka. Before 1917, he had carried out experiments in reforging by setting up a workshop and a cultural centre for the prisoners of a local jail in Mogilyov, where he worked as a legal assistant and was acquainted with the prison governor. The idea of reforging surfaced in many of his legal writings in the 1920s and 1930s,

  Teachers and students of the Law Department of the Communist Academy in Leningrad, 1931 (the white-haired Slavin is seated on the far left of the front, seated row)

  particularly in his articles on the idea of Comrade Courts (tovarishcheskie sudy), tribunals at the workplace, in which he argued for the use of penal labour as a form of community service to reform the prisoner.105

  In 1933, Slavin was given a new task by the leadership of the Communist Academy – to write a book provisionally entitled ‘The Reforging of Penal Labourers as Exemplified by the White Sea Canal’.106 In essence, he was asked to come up with a legal and philosophical justification for the Gulag labour camps. Perhaps Slavin’s previous writings on reforging played a role in earning him this dreadful commission. But the main reason why he had been chosen was because he had already shown, through Sabotage on the Front of Soviet Criminal Law, that he was prepared to construct legal arguments for the regime’s system of repression.

  To believe in perekovka was one thing, to see it in action another. In 1932–3, Slavin made several trips to the White Sea Canal and to other sites of penal labour, including the Moscow–Volga Canal and the Kolyma labour camps in north-east Siberia. What he saw there destroyed his belief in the Soviet ideal of reforging. Ida recalls how her father returned from these trips ‘exhausted and depressed’ – how ‘he would not talk to anyone for several days, as if he was living in a state of shock’. Slavin was particularly shaken by his visit to a children’s labour colony, where he was alarmed by the brutal discipline that was used by the guards to ‘reforge the children in the Soviet spirit’. Slavin could not bring himself to write the book on the White Sea Canal. For several years he postponed its completion. A number of draft chapters were torn up (one of them entitled ‘Fascist Distortions in the Policy of Reforging’), as he came to realize that there was no perekovka in the camps.

  Slavin knew he was trapped. After the murder of Kirov, when half the staff was purged from the Communist Academy, Slavin feared that he would be arrested too. Ida recalls her parents locking themselves in their room: ‘They sat up talking, whispering, all night.’ The Party archives confirm that in December 1934 Slavin’s name was added to a list of political suspects (‘to be arrested at a future date’) who had left other parties to join the Bolsheviks.107

  Under growing pressure from the leaders of the Communist
Academy, Slavin submitted some draft chapters of the book on the White Sea Canal. In these chapters Slavin offered a number of criticisms of the daily workings of the Gulag system, but made no reference to the policy of reforging, of which he had seen no evidence. The chapter he had once called ‘Fascist Distortions’ now appeared as ‘Distortions in the Policy of Reforging’. It was a courageous act, for which Slavin was sharply criticized by the editorial commission of the Communist Academy in May 1935. That event was a moral turning-point. Sensing that he could no longer hold to his Bolshevik beliefs, he renewed his old contacts with the Zionists – a desperate attempt, in Ida’s words, ‘to put the clock back and make up for his political mistakes’. But Slavin must have known that it was too late. He was in a hopeless situation. Completing the book on perekovka might have saved him, but he could not do this morally, so he kept putting it off, surely aware that the longer he delayed the closer he was moving to his own arrest. ‘I am finished,’ Slavin told a meeting of his Party comrades at the Communist Academy in March 1937, ‘I am a political bankrupt.’108

  5

  In the middle of the 1930s, the Gulag population swelled to huge proportions, as the victims of collectivization and the famine were rounded up and sent to labour camps, now considered an integral component of the Soviet industrial economy. Between 1932 and 1936, the population of the labour camps, labour colonies and ‘special settlements’ reached 2.4 million people (the prison population would add another half a million).109 This slave labour force played an especially vital role in the timber, construction and mining industries in the remote regions of the Arctic North, where free labour would not go. Consequently, even inside the Gulag it was possible for people to advance their careers. Opportunities were available, not only to prison guards and administrators, whose service in the Gulag often brought promotion in the NKVD, but also to a select number of prisoners, provided they had skills required by the Gulag system and the commitment – or willingness to adapt – to the Party line.

  Pavel Vittenburg, the geologist who had played such a leading role in the Soviet exploration of mining areas in the Arctic zone, was arrested in April 1930. He was one of several hundred scientists expelled in a purge of the Academy of Sciences. Imprisoned in Leningrad, he was gradually broken down by interrogations and by threats against his family, until he finally confessed to belonging to a monarchist organization that had helped to organize the Iakutsk rebellion in 1927 (when Vittenburg had been involved in the exploration of the Kolyma goldfields in north-east Siberia). The breaking point had come when his interrogator had got up in his presence and made a call to order the arrest of Pavel’s wife, Zina (Zinaida). While Pavel was in jail, Zina lived in constant expectation of arrest. The family was forced to move into one room of their spacious country house in Olgino, while an OGPU informer occupied the other rooms and organized the confiscation of their property. Pavel’s daughter Yevgeniia recalls accompanying her mother on weekly trips to Leningrad to enquire about Pavel at the OGPU offices on Gorokhovaia Street:

  She would leave me, an eight-year-old girl, by the fountains (which were not working then) in the Admiralty gardens, telling me that I should wait for her return. If she did not come, it would mean that she had been arrested, and I was to go to an address she had written on a piece of paper, which I kept in my pocket. Tatiana Lvovna lived there, and she would take me in.

  In February 1931, Pavel was sentenced to be shot. At the last moment he was given a reprieve and sentenced to ten years in a labour camp instead. His house at Olgino was confiscated (it became the dacha of an OGPU official). Pavel was sent to the Mai-Guba logging camp to fell timber for the White Sea Canal and then transferred as a sewage engineer to the labour camp near Kem, on the northern sector of the canal where it ran into the sea. Zina meanwhile moved with two of her daughters, Yevgeniia and Valentina, into a single room in a communal apartment in Leningrad (her eldest daughter Veronika had moved to Dagestan). There were sixteen people living in the communal apartment, including its original owners, an elderly couple who occupied the front room and their former servant, a woman full of ‘class hatred’, who lived behind a curtain in the corridor. During the summer Zina sent her two daughters to stay with relatives in Kiev, while she worked as a volunteer doctor in the labour camp at Kem so as to be close to her husband.110

  Shortly after Zina’s return to Leningrad, in August 1931, Pavel was sent as a geologist to the island of Vaigach as part of a special OGPU expedition to explore the possibility of mining its precious minerals.

  Zina and Pavel Vittenburg at the Kem labour camp (White Sea Canal), 1931

  Pavel was lucky. He was saved by his expertise as a geologist. Although still a prisoner, he was allowed to work in his own field and demonstrated his talents in the service of the Gulag. The Vaigach expedition was led by Fyodor Eikhmans, the OGPU head of the whole Gulag, who left his post in Moscow to set up the first camp on the remote Arctic island in the Kara Sea in June 1930. Nearly half of the 1,500 prisoners were geologists, topographers and engineers, who surveyed the island’s rich deposits of zinc and lead and searched in vain for gold and platinum, Eikhmans’s real reasons for getting involved in the project. The Nenets people (Samoyeds), who lived on the island and provided transport for the expedition, told of ancient legends about the ‘golden woman’, a totem doll of solid gold. Conditions in the camp were very difficult, especially in the first months before the barracks had been built, when everybody had to live in tents. The zinc and lead mines were all dug by hand, discipline was harsh – people were shot for the slightest infraction

  – and many died from the extreme cold, which regularly reached temperatures of -40°C during the winter.111

  By the time Vittenburg arrived the hunt for gold had become desperate, which probably explains why he was called up to reinforce the number of geologists already there. Pavel was quickly made the chief geologist. He completed the survey of Vaigach, which led to the opening of the Gulag mining complex, the first mines within the Arctic Circle, in 1934. He published several articles about the expedition in OGPU periodicals and even kept a scrapbook on the island’s natural history. For a prisoner, Pavel enjoyed a privileged existence. He received special rations, lived in a separate house for specialists and even had his own office. In March 1932, he was allowed a visit by his family, who returned in the summer to accompany him on a major expedition around Vaigach. Leaving Valentina with a friend in Leningrad, Zina came with Yevgeniia to live with Pavel in the summer of 1933, when the new commander of the camp, Aleksei Ditsklan, who replaced Eikhmans in October 1932, allowed specialists to be joined by their families. Her letters home describe the conditions:

  Vaigach Is.

  26 Aug. 1933

  My dear little daughters, Veronichka and Liusenka [Valentina]. Late in the evening on the 24th we finally arrived at Papa’s. It took 6 days, 3 of them in cold force-five winds, to get here. Gulenka [Yevgeniia] was very brave considering that most of the passengers around us were sea-sick all the time… Papochka met us on the ship, loaded everything onto his motorboat, and by 11 o’clock we were home. Papochka looks very well, he has put on weight, his face is an excellent colour, without a single wrinkle. His mood is good, he is full of energy and, as always, he is happy in his work… We are living very well in a house for specialists, remarkably in fact, if you stop to think that this is the 70th parallel. We have two delightful rooms, each with three windows, so they are very light, even though they face towards the north-east and north-west. There is an enormous stove with an oven, so I shall have to improve my housekeeping skills, which I have completely lost. I shall send you a photograph of Papa with the next ship, and you will see for yourselves how good it is here and how much weight Papa has put on… Yesterday evening we were at a reception to bid farewell to those [prisoners] returning to the mainland, and to welcome the new arrivals. We liked the speeches very much, and the Heroes of Labour were very well received. The Vaigach expedition, it appears, came in first in the
All-Union Socialist Competition. There is a wonderful reforging (perekovka) of people happening here: all the prisoners return to the mainland as qualified, literate and conscious workers. If only we could reforge more like that… The evening ended with a ‘living newspaper’ [a form of agitprop] and an excellent concert. That’s all my news from the first one and a half days…112

  Gradually, within the confines of the labour camp, the Vittenburgs returned to the routines of family life. Zina worked as a doctor in the camp clinic. Yevgeniia attended the school for children of the specialists and administrators. ‘Our life revolved around the work of Mama and Papa,’ recalls Yevgeniia.

  Every morning, in whatever temperature, Papa filled a pan with cold water and washed himself in our room, ate some breakfast and then went to work in the geological section. When he returned we would eat our dinner, and then he would sit down at his desk. Mama was always tired from her work. In the evening she had barely strength to read. I did all the housework after school, because I had the most time. I fetched our dinners (two for voluntary workers and one for a prisoner) from the canteen. The cooks were all Chinese. They were excellent, they taught me how to bake. In general the food seemed royal to us compared with what we had in Leningrad.113