The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  By the same reasoning Simonov was ready to accept that his relative was guilty of some crime. Because his relative had been arrested once before (in 1931) and then released for lack of evidence, it seemed to Simonov that his rearrest must mean that firmer proof about his guilt had now come to light (a conclusion reinforced by the fact that his stepfather, who had also been arrested in 1931, was now left untroubled by the police).107 In other words, Simonov interpreted the indicators in a way to reinforce his system of Communist belief, because disbelief was ‘inconceivable’.

  Another way for people to reconcile the sudden disappearance of friends and relatives with their belief in Soviet justice was to tell themselves that some good people were arrested ‘by mistake’. According to this rationale, there were bound to be errors in identifying the true ‘enemies of the people’, because there were so many ‘enemies’, and they were so well hidden. In this way of thinking, the real enemy was always someone else – the sons and husbands of all the other women in the queue to hand in parcels at the prison gates – and never one’s own friends and relatives.

  Recalling the arrest of her husband in 1936, Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg summarized her reaction:

  No, it was impossible; it couldn’t happen to me, to him! Of course there had been rumours (just rumours – it was only the beginning of 1936) that something was going on, that there were arrests. But surely all this happened to other people; surely it couldn’t happen to us.108

  Olga’s husband thought that there had been some ‘misunderstanding’ when he was arrested by the NKVD. Like millions of others, he left saying to his wife that it would all soon be sorted out (‘It must be a mistake’). Sure that he would soon return, he took only an overnight bag. Slavin and Piatnitsky did the same.

  Convinced that an error had been made, many people wrote to Stalin to appeal for the release of relatives. Anna Semyonova, who was brought up as a Communist, recalls writing to Stalin after the arrest of her father in June 1937. ‘I imagined that after a few days Stalin would receive my letter, read it and say, “What is going on? Why has an honest man been arrested? Release him immediately and apologize to him.”’ Three months later, when Anna’s mother was taken away, she told herself again that ‘it must be a mistake’.109

  The downfall of Yezhov, the NKVD chief behind the Great Terror, reinforced this system of belief. Yezhov was brought down amidst a host of scandals (not all of them entirely false) about his private life in the autumn of 1938. There were homosexual affairs, bisexual orgies, bouts of heavy drinking and fantastic stories of his wife as an ‘English spy’. But the real reason for Yezhov’s fall was Stalin’s growing sense that mass arrests were no longer a workable strategy. At the rate the arrests were going, it would not be long before the entire Soviet population was in jail. Stalin made it clear that the NKVD could not carry on incarcerating people, solely on the basis of denunciations, without checking their veracity. He warned against careerists who made denunciations to promote their position in society. After Yezhov’s dismissal in December 1938, his replacement, Lavrenty Beria, immediately announced a full review of the arrests in Yezhov’s reign. By 1940, 1.5 million cases had been reviewed; 450,000 convictions had been quashed, 128,000 cases closed, 30,000 people released from jail, and 327,000 people let out of the Gulag’s labour camps and colonies. These releases restored many people’s faith in Soviet justice. They allowed waverers to put the ‘Yezhov terror’ (Yezhovshchina) down to a temporary aberration rather than to systemic abuse. The mass arrests had all been Yezhov’s doing, it was said, but Stalin had corrected his mistakes and exposed Yezhov as an ‘enemy of the people’ who had been trying to undermine the Soviet government by arresting its officials and spreading discontent. On 2 February 1940, Yezhov was tried by the Military Collegium, convicted of a terrorist conspiracy and of spying for Poland, Germany, Britain and Japan and shot in a special building which he himself had built for shooting ‘enemies’ not far from the Lubianka.110

  Beria’s appointment was greeted with relief. ‘We were overjoyed by the appearance of this pure and ideal figure, as Beria appeared to us,’ remembers Mark Laskin, who hoped, like many people, that ‘all the innocents would now be released, leaving only the real spies and enemies in jail’.111 Simonov recalls that Beria’s review was enough to restore his belief in Soviet justice and dispel any doubts he may have had over the arrest of relatives. Indeed, its effect on Simonov was to reinforce his conviction that anybody who was not released, or who was arrested subsequently, must be guilty of some crime. Recalling his reaction to the arrest in 1939 of the writer Isaak Babel and the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Simonov confessed:

  Despite the importance of these men in literature and the theatre, and the huge shockwaves which their sudden disappearance caused – already at that time – the fact that these arrests were so sudden and, in general, in those circles, so unusual, and because they took place under Beria, who was correcting Yezhov’s mistakes – all this made me think: maybe these men are indeed guilty of something. Many of the people arrested during Yezhov’s reign were perhaps innocent, but these people had been left untouched by Yezhov and were suddenly arrested when the old mistakes were being corrected. So it seemed likely that there were good reasons for their arrest.112

  One of the people to have serious doubts about the charges against Meyerhold and Babel was Vladimir Stavsky, the former General Secretary of the Writers’ Union, who had attempted to recruit Simonov as an informer. Born into a working-class family in the provincial town of Penza, Stavsky could not have risen to the summit of the Soviet literary establishment without learning how to compromise his moral principles. As Stalin’s ‘executioner of Soviet literature’, he had authorized the arrests of numerous writers and personally wrote the denunciation which led to the arrest of Mandelshtam in the spring of 1938.113 But all this time Stavsky was tormented by doubts and fears. He confessed his despair to his diary, which, like Prishvin, he wrote in a tiny scrawl, barely legible to anybody else. Stavsky was particularly troubled by a story he had heard about a Party official who used his chauffeured car as a brothel. ‘I don’t understand how it happened,’ the chauffeur had said of the official. ‘He was just an ordinary boy, one of us, but then he crossed some dividing line and turned into a pig with his whole mug covered in filth. A regular worker doesn’t get that dirty in a whole lifetime.’114 Perhaps as a response to his loss of faith, Stavsky began drinking heavily, put on weight and became ill, often not appearing at work for days on end, as he recovered from his latest alcoholic binge. He avoided meetings where writers were denounced, or only spoke against them in the mildest terms. For this he himself was finally denounced by the Party Committee of the Writers’ Union in November 1937:

  As the leader of the Writers’ Union, comrade Stavsky makes a lot of noise about the need for vigilance in literature, he calls for a campaign for the revelation of enemies. But in reality he has helped to conceal the Averbakhians, he does not really speak out to disarm the enemies of the people and alien elements of the Party and he remains silent about his own mistakes in habouring connections with the enemy.115

  Stavsky came under growing pressure from his political masters and was ultimately dismissed from the leadership of the Writers’ Union in the spring of 1938.

  There were many people, like Stavsky, who had doubts about the mass arrests, but few who spoke out against them. The possibilities for effective opposition were extremely limited in any case, as Piatnitsky’s protest at the Party plenum clearly showed. Groups and individuals wrote to Party leaders to express their outrage at the mass arrests but nearly always did so anonymously. ‘Hundreds of thousands of innocent people are languishing in jails, and no one knows what for… Everything is based on lies,’ wrote one unnamed group to Molotov in June 1938 (‘Excuse us if we do not sign our names, it is forbidden to complain’).116 There were some protests by Party members in the localities, particularly by the older Bolsheviks, whose political morals had been formed before
the rise of Stalin.

  Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg tells the story of one Old Bolshevik called Altunin she came across in Kolyma in 1939. He came from somewhere in Voronezh province and had worked as a tanner before joining the Party. A handsome middle-aged man with a reddish beard, he had once been very strong, but working in the mines had weakened him. By the time Olga met him he had been transferred to a women’s construction brigade in Magadan, where he worked as a toolmaker. He told Olga his story:

  When it all started in 1937, first this comrade was an enemy, then that one, and we expelled them from the Party, we all raised our hands; and then we killed them all, our own comrades.

  At first I pretended to be ill. That way I didn’t have to go to the Party meetings and raise my hand. But then I saw that something needed to be done: we could not go on like this, we were destroying the Party, killing good and honest people. I did not believe that they were all traitors, I knew these people well.

  One evening I sat down and wrote a letter. I sent one copy to my local Party organization, one to Stalin, and one to the [Party’s] Central Control Commission. I wrote that we were killing the Revolution… I poured my whole heart into this letter. I showed it to my wife. She said: ‘This is suicide. The day after you send that letter they will put you in prison.’ But I said: ‘Let them put me in prison. Better to be behind bars than to raise my hand and kill a comrade.’

  Well, she was right. I sent my letter and three days later I was in jail. They worked me over – and I got ten years in Kolyma.

  Asked if he ever regretted what he had done, Altunin replied that there had been one occasion, when he was thrown into an isolation cell after his labour team had failed to clear the tree-roots of a forest in a very heavy frost:

  Suddenly I felt really sorry for myself: other people had been sentenced for nothing, but I had put myself away. And what was the point of writing what I wrote? Nothing would change. Maybe Solts [head of the Central Control Commission] felt a bit ashamed, but the old Moustache [Stalin] – what did he care? There was no getting through to him. And right now, I thought, I could be sitting at home with my wife and children around the samovar in a warm room. As soon as I thought that, I began beating my head against the wall to stop such thoughts from entering my mind. All night long I ran around my cell cursing myself for such regrets.117

  The only source of opposition capable of having any real influence was within the system of repression itself. Judges in the local courts were often quite effective in softening sentences, sometimes even throwing cases out on the grounds of lack of evidence, though after the summer of 1937, almost all the people swept up in the mass arrests were summarily tried and sentenced by the troikas, the special three-man tribunals (usually made up by the NKVD, the Procuracy and the Party) set up to circumvent the courts.118 Within the NKVD, too, there were some brave officials willing to speak out against the mass arrests, particularly during the ‘kulak operations’, which reminded many local NKVD agents of the bloody chaos in 1928–33. Eduard Salyn, the NKVD chief in Omsk province, spoke out at a conference convened by Stalin and Yezhov to discuss the ‘kulak operation’ in July 1937. Salyn said that in his region there were

  insufficient numbers of enemies of the people and Trotskyists to warrant a campaign of repression, and in general I consider it to be completely wrong to decide beforehand how many people to arrest and shoot.

  Shortly after the conference Salyn was arrested, tried and shot.119

  Mikhail Shreider was another NKVD officer who voiced his opposition to the mass arrests. In his memoirs, written in the 1970s, he describes himself as a ‘pure Chekist’, inspired by the Leninist ideals of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka in 1917. Shreider wrote his memoirs to justify his work in the Cheka and portray himself as a victim of the Great Terror. According to his version of events, he became disillusioned with the Stalinist regime as he observed the corruption of his fellow NKVD officers during the 1930s. Comrades he had known as decent and honest men were now prepared to use any form of torture against ‘enemies of the people’, if it meant advancing their careers. Shreider was also troubled by the scale of the arrests. He could not believe in the existence of so many ‘enemies of the people’. But he was afraid to express his doubts in case he was denounced. He soon discovered that many of his colleagues shared his fear, but no one would break the conspiracy of silence. Even when a trusted colleague disappeared, the most that any of his comrades dared to say was that he might be an ‘honest man’. Nobody suggested that he might be innocent, because this would expose them to the risk of denunciation for questioning the purge. ‘No one understood why all these arrests were happening,’ recalled Shreider, ‘but people were afraid to speak out, because that might raise suspicion that they were aiding or communicating with the “enemies of the people”.’120

  For several months, Shreider watched in silence as old friends and colleagues were arrested and sentenced to death. Unable to oppose the Terror, he became a sort of conscientious objector by not attending the executions of NKVD colleagues in the Lubianka yard. Then, in the spring of 1938, Shreider was transferred to Alma-Ata, where he became the second-in-command to Stanislav Redens, the NKVD chief of Kazakhstan (and the brother-in-law of Stalin). Shreider and Redens became close friends. They lived next door to each other, and their families were always in each other’s homes. Shreider noticed Redens’ growing disgust with the torture methods of his operatives. He thought that Redens was a man of humane sensibilities. Redens, for his part, had marked out Shreider as somebody who shared his doubts about the methods used in the Great Terror. Late one night he drove him out of town and stopped the car. The two men got out and began to walk. When they were out of earshot of the chauffeur, Redens said to Shreider. ‘If Feliks Eduardovich [Dzerzhinsky] were still alive, he would have the lot of us shot for the way we’re working now.’ Shreider made out that he did not understand: to show complicity in such a thought was enough to warrant his immediate arrest, and he could not be sure that what his boss had said was not a provocation. Redens continued talking. It became clear to Shreider that he had meant what he had said. Shreider opened up his troubled soul as well. Once this trust had been established, the two men confided in each other. Redens regretted that all the decent Communists had been destroyed, while the likes of Yezhov remained untouched. Yet there were still subjects that were too dangerous for him to talk about. Looking back on these whispered conversations, Shreider thought that Redens knew far more about the Terror than he had let on: ‘His situation and the circumstances of the times obliged him, like all of us, not to call things by their name, and not to talk about such things, even with his friends.’121

  Shreider was emboldened by his conversations with Redens. They made him feel remorseful and angry. He wrote to Yezhov to protest against the arrest of an old colleague in the NKVD, and against the arrest of his wife’s cousin, a student in Moscow, vouchsafing the innocence of both these men. A few days later, in June 1938, Redens received a telegram from Yezhov ordering the arrest of Shreider. Presented with this news in Redens’ office, Shreider begged Redens to appeal to Stalin: ‘Stanislav Frantsevich, you know me well, and you, after all, are his brother-in-law. It must be a mistake.’ Redens replied: ‘Mikhail Pavlovich, I shall put in a word for you, but I fear it is hopeless. Today it is you, no doubt tomorrow it will be my turn.’ Shreider was imprisoned in the Butyrki prison in Moscow. In July 1940, he was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp followed by three years in exile. Redens was arrested in November 1938. He was shot in January 1940.122

  5

  On the night of her father’s arrest, in May 1937, Elena Bonner was sent by her mother to stay with her aunt Anya and her uncle Lyova so that she would be out of the way during the NKVD search of the Bonner apartment. The fourteen-year-old Elena walked through Leningrad and knocked on the door of her relatives. ‘The door opened immediately, as if they were expecting me,’ recalls Elena, who then explained to her aunt and uncle what had happ
ened. Her uncle was frightened and angry. He started asking questions about her father’s work:

  I didn’t understand what he was getting at and tried to enter the apartment. Anya said something. Lyova practically shouted at her, ‘Anya, damn it, you’re always…’ And he barred my way with his right arm across the doorway. Then he spoke in a loud whisper, very fast, ‘We can’t let you in; we can’t. What’s the matter? Don’t you understand that?’ He repeated it several times, spraying me with his spittle. Anya said something. I could see her mouth moving, but I heard nothing except Lyova’s whisper as loud as a shout. I retreated from the door until my back was pressed against the bannister. The door slammed. I stood there, unable to comprehend what had happened to me. Then I wiped my face with my hand and started down the stairs. I hadn’t reached the bottom of the flight when I heard the door opening. When I turned, Lyova was in the doorway. I was afraid he would call me back. But he said nothing and then started to close the door slowly. I shouted, ‘Scoundrel!’ and I saw him turn white.123

  There are countless such stories of abandonment by friends and neighbours and even by kin following the arrest of a close relative. People were afraid of making contact with the families of ‘enemies of the people’. They crossed the street to avoid them, did not talk to them in the corridors of communal blocks and forbade their children to play with theirs in the courtyard. People removed the photographs of friends and relatives who had disappeared, sometimes even tearing out or scribbling over faces in family portraits.

  According to Solzhenitsyn:

  The mildest and at the same time the most widespread form of betrayal was not to do anything bad directly, but just not to notice the doomed person next to one, not to help him, to turn away one’s face, to shrink back. They had arrested a neighbour, your comrade at work, or even your close friend. You kept silence. You acted as if you had not noticed.124