The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Pavel Vittenburg in his office, Vaigach labour camp, 1934

  What lies behind this rosy view of the Gulag? According to Yevgeniia, Zina’s optimism, even her belief in perekovka, was genuinely held, not just written in her letters for the benefit of the censors.114 No doubt the happiness of being reunited as a family must have played a part. But equally important were the relatively privileged conditions of specialists like the Vittenburgs which sheltered them from the worst aspects of life inside the camp. Possibly, too, they were so wrapped up in their work that they willingly accepted any view that allowed them to continue with it and sleep easily at night.

  In 1934, there was a revolt on the island of Vaigach. A gang of prisoners working on the far side of the island rebelled and killed their guards. There was nowhere for the rebels to escape, and eventually they were shot or captured and brought back to the camp. As one of the camp doctors, Zina had to inspect their wounds and decide which prisoners were fit to return to work. She saw evidence of terrible beatings, but nothing shook her faith in perekovka, nor her readiness, as she had agreed in her contract of employment, to enforce the camp’s regime of labour discipline by reducing the time spent by prisoners on sick leave. For her work in the aftermath of the uprising, Zina was rewarded with the honourable title of ‘shock worker’ (udarnitsa) and listed in the ‘Red Book’ of the camp. She helped to teach the prisoners to read and to learn a craft in the belief that this would help reforge their personality and rehabilitate them to society. She even joined the Party school and wrote to tell her daughters that she loved her studies there.115

  Pavel was equally prepared to go along with the official view of the Gulag, according to Yevgeniia. In her view, he ‘lived entirely for his science’ and ‘took little interest in politics’. He was ‘grateful to the Soviet regime for giving him the opportunity to continue working in his field, and grateful too that his family had been allowed to join him at Vaigach’. If he believed the propaganda about perekovka, it was because, according to his daughter, ‘he was sincere, naive perhaps, and romantic by nature’. Much of this is perhaps true. But it is the viewpoint of a loving daughter who cherishes the memory of her father. Seen from a different perspective, Pavel’s actions could be described as a profound moral compromise. His work was clearly flourishing in the environment of the labour camp, where everything he needed was provided for. ‘How pleasant to be a commander at Vaigach,’ Pavel wrote in his diary. ‘There is a semi-military discipline and complete obedience among the workers here.’ In July 1935, Pavel was given early release, six years before the end of his sentence, in recognition of his valuable work. But he wanted to complete his geological research on Vaigach, so he signed a contract with the administration to continue working voluntarily. This, it seems, was a crucial turning-point, the moment when he ceased to be a prisoner, working for the Gulag by compulsion, and became a collaborator in the Gulag system to advance his own research.

  After finishing his work on Vaigach, Pavel went to the Dmitrov labour camp, where he was employed as a geologist in the construction of the Moscow–Volga Canal. Meanwhile, Zina and Yevgeniia, having returned to Leningrad, found that ‘life became more comfortable’. They went back to the communal apartment where they had lived before – and Valentina and Veronika joined then. They soon received an extra room, after the old owners of the apartment were arrested in the Leningrad terror following the murder of Kirov. Because they were not allowed to recover their old furniture from Olgino, which was still used as a dacha by the NKVD, the Vittenburgs were invited to the NKVD warehouse and allowed to help themselves to furniture confiscated from the victims of the Leningrad arrests. Valentina and Veronika picked out a pair of antique armchairs, a divan, a mirror, a bookcase and a grand piano.116

  Pavel returned to Leningrad in 1936. For the next two years, he worked for the Gulag administration of the Arctic Ocean, leading several expeditions to Severnaia Zemlia. ‘How to get more living space so that we can live together comfortably – as one united close-knit family – that is the task I cannot seem to solve,’ Pavel wrote to Yevgeniia in 1936. Although he had managed to secure a privileged position through his work in the Gulag, he still felt insecure politically, and he worried about his family.

  It is hard to accept that I am so powerless to arrange a comfortable life for all of you, as you deserve after all your suffering with me. The one thing I could do is build a little house, but Mama will not hear of it. Powerful people, who might help me, have turned their backs on me. When will I regain even a tenth of the influence I had before 1930?

  Pavel made a conscious effort to Sovietize himself. He took lessons in the Party’s history, and embraced the Truth that it taught him. By the end of 1936, he was ready to accept its teachings on the ‘Trotskyists’ and other ‘enemies’ of the Soviet regime. ‘What a shame that I never knew anything about this,’ Pavel wrote in his diary. ‘If only I had known how reading history broadens the horizon and enables one to reach a proper understanding of the Party’s general line. Maybe my life would not have been forced on to the stony path of exile and imprisonment. For what was my life destroyed? That bastard Trotsky is to blame for thousands of lost lives!’117

  Pavel’s story reminds us that the Gulag was far more than a prison camp. As one of the driving forces of the Soviet industrial economy, it employed a vast army of specialists and technicians – engineers, geologists, architects, research scientists, even aircraft designers – and gave them unique opportunities to develop their careers.

  Pavel Drozdov was born in 1906 to a peasant family in Chernigov. His father was actively involved in the Marxist movement before 1917. After both his parents were killed in the Civil War, Pavel went to Moscow, joined the Economics Faculty of Moscow University and then trained as an electrician. (He later worked for Moscow Energy, the power station responsible for the electrification of much of the capital.) In 1925, Pavel was arrested for his participation in a student organization at Moscow University. He was exiled for three years to the Krasnovishersk region, where he worked in a logging camp attached to Vishlag, then still in its early days. On his release, in 1927, a year before the end of his sentence, Pavel chose to remain at the camp, where he was employed as an accountant. He married Aleksandra, a young peasant girl from a village near the camp, and had two children, who lived with him in the hostel for administrators in the camp complex. In 1929, when Eduard Berzin, the ‘enlightened’ Gulag chief, arrived at Vishlag, Pavel’s fortunes changed dramatically. Berzin championed the reforging of prisoners, and in Drozdov he believed that he had found a living example of his ideal. Berzin recognized the talents of Pavel, in particular his photographic memory (Berzin liked to say that Pavel had a ‘built-in calculator in his head’). He rapidly promoted Pavel in the camp administration, and often drew attention to the former prisoner as an example of reforging in his talks to senior officials at Vishlag. In 1929, Pavel was appointed chief accountant of the logging camp and, in 1930, chief accountant of the entire Vishlag complex. As one of Berzin’s close associates, Pavel followed Berzin when he left Vishlag to organize the Dalstroi network of labour camps in north-east Siberia. In Magadan, the capital of this Gulag empire, Pavel became the chief accountant in the Planning Section of the Dalstroi Trust and an inspector of the Dalstroi labour camps. Promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general in the NKVD, Pavel was rewarded with a four-room flat, which was big enough to house not just his family, but the family of his sister too. He was also given an apartment in Moscow, where Aleksandra and the children would spend the winter months. The family lived a privileged existence, with access to the special shops and sanatoria exclusively reserved for the Stalinist elite, and manufactured gifts from the Dalstroi factories on the Soviet holidays.118 Not bad for a man who, only a few years before, had been a common prisoner in the Gulag.

  Mikhail Stroikov was born in 1901 to a family of Old Believers near Ivanovo, 300 kilometres north-east of Moscow. In 1925, he enrolled as a student at the Moscow Architectur
al Institute and married Elena, a young artist at a rabfak school (which prepared students from working-class backgrounds to study at an institute). Their daughter Julia was born in 1927. Just before her birth, Mikhail was arrested and exiled to Siberia: he had belonged to a student group opposed to the agrarian policies of the Bolsheviks. Elena was expelled from the rabfak school and went to work in a textile factory. In 1930, Mikhail returned to Moscow and rejoined the Architectural Institute, but two years later he was rearrested and imprisoned for two years in the Butyrki jail. Mikhail was considered a brilliant student. He had not been able to complete his dissertation before his arrest, but thanks to the intervention of his professor, he was allowed to do so in the Butyrki, and even to defend it at the institute. It is inconceivable that Mikhail could have done this without the support of the political police. He had two uncles in OGPU, and one of his oldest friends was Filipp Bazanov, Elena’s first husband, who was also a senior official in OGPU. Bazanov helped Elena (and tried to persuade her to return to him) while Mikhail was in jail. In 1934, Mikhail was exiled to Arkhangelsk. Although he had relatives in Arkhangelsk, among them the family of the former vice-governor of Murmansk, Mikhail did not visit them, because he did not want to endanger them.

  Mikhail was saved by his architectural expertise. He was employed by the NKVD as a planner-architect on several major building projects – factories and bridges – using Gulag labour from the nearby camps. He soon became one of the chief architects of Arkhangelsk. Even as a prisoner in exile, Mikhail enjoyed better living conditions than Elena and Julia in Moscow. Mikhail was earning good money. He ate in the NKVD cafeteria for engineers and technicians, where meat was served every day, whereas Julia and Elena were living in Moscow on a diet of porridge and bread. Mikhail sent them money to buy meat. Julia was often ill and desperately needed better food. At the end of 1934, Elena sent her to live with her father in Arkhangelsk, in the hope that she would benefit from Mikhail’s relatively comfortable position. The last time Julia had seen her father (the only recollection she had of him) was two years earlier, in the Butyrki prison, a visit which had left her in such a state that, at the age of only six, she had tried to commit suicide. Mikhail rented the corner of a room from an old woman, Elena Petrovna, who prepared their meals. Julia recalls these meals – pork cutlets with macaroni, pancakes with mincemeat, chicken legs, ice cream – with nostalgia.

  In the evenings, when Papa returned from work, he would ask me: ‘What shall we order from Elena Petrovna? What do you want to eat?’ I couldn’t get enough of her delicious food and I would always say [the first dish she had cooked for us], ‘Macaroni and cutlets! Macaroni and cutlets!’ One day Papa had enough. He implored me: ‘Liusenka, think of something else, I can’t eat any more.’ But I could not think of any other food.

  For Julia the years she spent in Arkhangelsk, from 1934 to 1937, were the happiest in her life. She thrived at school. She loved the ballet. Her father took her to the theatre and bought a gramophone so she could dance to ballet music in their tiny living space. ‘Papa’s Corner’, as Elena called this living space, was just seven square metres, with a plywood partition and door constructed by Mikhail to divide it from the rest of the room, where Elena Petrovna lived. Mikhail was very proud of his construction, which created the illusion of a separate room. ‘Papa’s Corner’ was just big enough for a single bed, a table, a chair and a bookcase on the wall. But it was a home of sorts, and Julia was happy to be living there with her father.

  ‘Papa’s Corner’. Drawing by Mikhail Stroikov, 1935

  In January 1937, Elena came to Arkhangelsk. The end of Mikhail’s sentence was approaching, and she wanted to return to Moscow as a family. But the authorities would not let her stay in Arkhangelsk until the end of Mikhail’s exile, and so Elena went back to Moscow with Julia. A few weeks later, in March, Mikhail was arrested and sentenced to five years in a labour camp for ‘counter-revolutionary agitation’ (he was shot in 1938). Elena knew nothing about his arrest. There were no more letters from her husband. She only learned what had happened the next summer when she went back to Arkhangelsk and spoke to Elena Petrovna.119

  The Vittenburgs, the Drozdovs and the Stroikovs were exceptional, of course. The vast majority of the Gulag population was used as slave labour, or left to languish in prison camps and remote settlements, with little access to the comforts of normal life, or even prospect of reprieve. The cost in human lives was enormous. NKVD statistics show that over 150,000 people died in Soviet labour camps between 1932 and 1936.120 These figures cast a different light on the mid-1930s, a period which has often been regarded as the calm before the storm of 1937–8 (the poet Anna Akhmatova called the middle thirties the ‘vegetarian years’). For those whose lives were devastated by the Great Terror, that view of the mid-thirties may be true. But for millions of people whose families were scattered in the Gulag’s labour camps and colonies, these years were as bad as any other.

  Reading the letters of these prisoners to their relatives at home (letters that were written with censorship in mind), it is striking how the Gulag changed the values and priorities of so many of these prisoners – particularly the ‘politicals’, who had sacrificed so much for their ideals. Where before they might have looked for happiness in their career, or in the promise of a Communist utopia, years of living in a prison camp or exile forced them to rethink and place greater value on the family.

  Tatiana Poloz (née Miagkova) was born in 1898 to the family of a barrister in the Borisoglebsk region of Tambov province. Her mother, Feoktista, the daughter of a priest, was a member of the Social Democratic Party who sided with the Bolsheviks when they split with the Mensheviks in 1903; she encouraged Tatiana to enter politics. In 1919, Tatiana joined the Bolshevik Party and took part in propaganda work behind the lines of Denikin’s White Army on the Southern Front in the Civil War. It was there that she met her husband, Mikhail Poloz, a leading member of the Borotbists (Socialist Revolutionaries), the only Ukrainian party with a mass peasant following, who at that time was serving in the Military Council of the Ukrainian independent government. At the end of the Civil War, the Borotbists merged with the Bolsheviks, the Ukraine was brought under Soviet rule, and Poloz became the Ukraine’s political representative (polpred) in Moscow. Tatiana joined the Higher Party School, attending lectures by Trotsky. In 1923, Mikhail was named Commissar of Finance in the Soviet Ukrainian government. He and Tatiana settled in Kharkov (the capital of Soviet Ukraine until 1934), where their daughter Rada was born in 1924.

  Three years later, Tatiana was exiled to Astrakhan, and then, in 1929, to Chelkar in Kazakhstan. She was accused of being an active oppositionist, with links to the Smirnov group, an important faction of the Left Opposition led by Trotsky until the expulsion of its leaders from the Party in 1927. In the autumn of 1929, Mikhail visited Tatiana in Kazakhstan. He pleaded with her to renounce her opposition politics for the sake of their daughter, who was then living with her grandmother. At one point, according to a fellow oppositionist who was also exiled in Chelkar, Mikhail whispered something in her ear: ‘It was some sort of secret information that left her utterly despondent and defeated.’ Perhaps Mikhail had told her that Smirnov and his group had been negotiating a capitulation with the Stalinist authorities in the hope of being reinstated in the Party. On 3 November 1929, an article by Smirnov appeared in Pravda in which he declared his full support for the Five Year Plan and the ‘general line of the Party’, renounced his Trotskyist position and called on all his followers ‘to overcome their hesitations and return to the Party’. Four hundred members of the Smirnov group subsequently signed a declaration of submission to the Party’s general line, including Tatiana, who was then released from exile and allowed to return to her family.121

  In 1930, the family moved from Kharkov to Moscow, where Poloz became Deputy Chairman of the All-Union Soviet Budget Commission, while Tatiana worked as an economist in the automobile industry. They lived with Tatiana’s mother, Feoktista, and a housekee
per, in a large apartment in the House on the Embankment, the prestigious block of flats for government workers opposite the Kremlin, although, as romantic revolutionaries who had always lived for their ideas, the family did not attach much importance to their privileged lifestyle. Tatiana kept to her Trotskyist position, against the wishes of both her husband, who insisted that opposition to Stalin was futile, and her mother, who was a convinced Stalinist. In 1933, Tatiana was rearrested, along with the rest of the Smirnov group, and sentenced to three years in a special isolation prison camp in Verkhneuralsk in the Urals. Mikhail was arrested a few months later, in 1934, convicted of attempting to establish a Ukrainian bourgeois government and sentenced to ten years at the Solovetsky labour camp. Evicted from the House on the Embankment, Rada and her grandmother moved to a furnished apartment in the outskirts of Moscow, where they were joined by Rada’s aunt Olga, whose husband had been arrested three years earlier, and their son Volodia. Feoktista ‘tried to teach me to respect and love my parents,’ recalls Rada.

  But at the same time she expected me to love and respect Soviet power. It was not an easy task, but somehow she managed it. Grandmother sincerely believed that Stalin did not know about the scale of the arrests… She thought that there were so many enemies of Soviet power that it was hard for the authorities to work out which ones were guilty. In our house one often heard the expression, ‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.’122

  The Poloz family, 1934: Rada is standing between her aunt Olga and her grandmother, Feoktista. The boy is Olga’s son Volodia

  Between 1933 and June 1936, Tatiana wrote 136 letters to Feoktista and Rada, an average of one letter every week. This is one of the largest surviving collections of private letters from the Gulag.123 The early letters reflect Tatiana’s political preoccupations. She asks for Marx’s writings to be sent. She comments in detail on the latest political events. In June 1934, for example, Tatiana’s letters were full of praise for the crew of the Cheliuskin, which had just completed a pioneering voyage across the Arctic Ocean from Leningrad to the Bering Straits. The journey had ended in disaster when the steamship was crushed by ice and sank beneath the Chukchi Sea in February 1934. But the crew, which camped on an iceberg, was finally rescued by Soviet planes and flown back to Moscow, where propaganda turned their story into one of heroic survival. The Cheliuskin crew had ‘shown the world what Bolsheviks are!’ Tatania wrote on 24 June, adding four days later, on the same subject: