The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg recalls that when her husband was arrested,

  People spoke to me in a special tone of voice; they were afraid of me. Some would cross the road when they saw me coming towards them. Others paid me special attention, but this was heroic on their part, and I and they were both aware of it.125

  After the arrest of her parents, in June 1937, Inna Gaister and her sister were evicted from their family dacha at Nikolina Gora. On the instructions of their parents they were taken by their nanny to the house of the poet Aleksandr Bezymensky, an old friend of their father, who they hoped would take them in. The poet drove them to the nearest station and put them on the first train to Moscow. ‘He was too afraid to get involved,’ recalls Inna. ‘He often used to stay in my grandmother’s house, but he and his wife had a new baby, and fear must have got the better of his decency.’126

  When Stanislav and Varvara Budkevich were arrested, in July 1937, their daughter Maria and her younger brother were evicted from the family’s two rooms in the communal apartment where they had lived in Leningrad. The rooms were then occupied by one of their neighbours, a wife and husband with three small children, who had been on friendly terms with the Budkeviches until 1937, when the wife had denounced them to the NKVD as counter-revolutionaries and spies (Stanislav was of Polish origin). The woman had even claimed that Varvara, a historical researcher, was a prostitute who brought her clients to the apartment. Maria’s brother was taken to an orphanage, but she was left entirely by herself; she was then just fourteen. For the first few days Maria stayed with a schoolfriend. Then she found a room where she lived on her own. An old friend of the family, the wife of a Bolshevik official, advised Maria to ask her former neighbours if they knew anything about the whereabouts of her parents. When Maria went back to the communal apartment, she received a hostile reception:

  My God, they were so afraid of me, they would not even let me in. Can you imagine? The woman who had taken over our rooms was annoyed and angry to see me. Whether her husband had already been arrested or was afraid that they would come for him, I don’t recall. Maybe the family was in trouble. Anyway they would not help. The woman simply said: ‘I don’t know anything. Nothing. Understand? And please don’t come here again!’127

  Neighbours became strangers overnight. For nearly thirty years the Turkins had lived next to the Nikitins. They shared the ground floor of a three-storeyed wooden house on the corner of Soviet and Sverdlov Streets in Perm – the seven Turkins (Aleksandr, Vera and their two daughters, Vera’s mother and her brother and sister) occupying three rooms on the right side of the house, and the Nikitins, a family of four, occupying three rooms on the left. Aleksandr Turkin was a veteran Bolshevik, one of Sverdlov’s comrades from the revolutionary underground in Perm. Like all his family, Aleksandr was employed at the Motovilikha steelworks. He was also a journalist for the local newspaper and a judge in the regional court. In 1936, he was arrested as a Trotskyist. His guilt was accepted as a ‘proven fact’ by his wife Vera, a factory worker who took no interest in politics. Vera’s mother, a domineering woman who ran the Turkin household, also thought that Aleksandr was guilty. She cut his face out of the family portrait in the living room. ‘If we have an enemy among us, we must clear him out,’ she said. Vera was dismissed from her job at the Motovilikha plant after being injured in an accident (as the wife of an ‘enemy of the people’ she did not qualify for sickness benefit). The only job that she could find was selling newspapers in a street kiosk. Vera’s brother and her sister Valia were also sacked from jobs at the plant. Valia, who was pregnant, was immediately renounced by her husband, who was granted a divorce on political grounds. The family struggled to make ends meet. There was never much to eat. But the hardest thing to bear, according to Vera’s daughter, was their ostracism by friends and neighbours:

  Everybody was afraid of us. They were afraid to talk to us, or even come near us, as if we had the plague and would infect them… Our neighbours avoided us, they forbade their children to play with us… In 1936 [when Aleksandr was arrested], nobody said anything about ‘enemies of the people’ – they just remained silent. But by 1937 everybody called us ‘enemies of the people’.

  The Nikitins, too, turned their backs on their neighbours. Anatoly Nikitin was a senior accountant at the Motovilikha works. Perhaps it was his fear of being sacked that made him cut all links with the Turkins. The two families used to eat together in a shared kitchen; their children used to play together in the yard outside. But now they kept apart and did not talk. The Nikitins even wrote to the Soviet to renounce their old neighbours and were rewarded with an extra room at the expense of the Turkins. Valia and her young baby were moved out of their room. They joined Valia’s brother and mother in the room next door. Anatoly’s sister then took over Valia’s room, which was joined with the Nikitin side by reopening a connecting door.128

  The Nikitin and Turkin apartments, Perm

  The Piatnitskys were similarly ostracized after Osip’s arrest in July 1937. Evicted from their apartment, with barely enough money to feed her sons, Julia turned for help to old friends in the Party. First she went to Aron Solts, a close friend of Osip for nearly thirty years. When she knocked on his door, Julia was told by his housekeeper: ‘He is afraid. He will throw me out if he sees you here. He told me to tell you that he does not know you.’ Julia then turned to Tsetsiliia Bobrovskaia, an Old Bolshevik whom she had known since 1917. At first she, too, refused to see Julia, but then she agreed to let her come in ‘for a few minutes’ before she went to work. She did not want to listen to Julia’s story but told her tearfully: ‘Go directly to the authorities, to Yezhov. Don’t ask anything of your comrades. Nobody will help and nobody can help.’ A few days later, Julia was on the Metro when she came across the widow of the Bolshevik leader Viktor Nogin: ‘She looked at me but said nothing… Then Lapev – a railwayman who knew Piatnitsky well – came into the carriage: he saw me and then for the whole journey turned to face the other way.’ Julia’s sons, Igor and Vladimir, were similarly abandoned by their friends. Vladimir’s best friend, Yevgeny Loginov, the son of one of Stalin’s secretaries, stopped coming to visit them. No one called on them any more. Vladimir was the target of a bullying campaign at school. ‘They taunted me, calling me an enemy of the people,’ he recalls, ‘and they stole things from me, books and clothes, just because they knew that I couldn’t defend myself.’ Isolated and betrayed by all her friends, Julia reflected on the tenuous nature of human connection. She wrote in her diary on 20 July:

  How awful people are to one another these days! I am convinced that if someone is friendly, or even just acts in a friendly or ‘comradely’ way, it’s not from any human interest or feelings of goodwill, but simply because of some sort of material interest, or other kind of advantage. Everybody knows we’ve lost everything, that we have nothing to live on, that we have nothing to eat, and yet no one lifts a finger to help us. We are dying, and nobody is interested.129

  As Elena Bonner discovered, even relatives turned their backs on the families of ‘enemies of the people’. Aleksei Yevseyev and his wife Natalia were active Communists. Aleksei was a doctor, a senior consultant to the Red Army on venereal disease, Natalia an economist in the Far Eastern Timber Trust. They lived with their daughter Angelina in Khabarovsk in the Far East. In 1937, Aleksei and Natalia were both expelled from the Party (Aleksei was connected to Marshal V. K. Bliukher, whose Far Eastern Army was the target of a major purge). Angelina, who was then fifteen, recalls her father coming home after his expulsion from the Party:

  He was terror-struck. He came home and said in horror: ‘They’re going to arrest me!’ I was just a stupid girl, fifteen years of age, and I said: ‘If you are arrested, it means it is necessary.’ My father had always said to me, ‘If they are arrested, it means it is necessary.’ All my life I have lived with the echo of my words: ‘It means it is necessary.’ I didn’t understand what it was all about.

  Aleksei was arrested on 1 June. He
was convicted of participating in a ‘Fascist plot against the Soviet government’ (he was shot in Khabarovsk in March 1938). After his arrest, Natalia and Angelina were evicted from their flat. Fearful of her own arrest, Natalia fled with Angelina to Moscow, where her family lived, hoping to leave her daughter in the care of relatives. At fifteen years of age, there was a danger that Angelina would be taken to an orphanage in the event of Natalia’s arrest. None of Natalia’s relatives, all ardent Communists, would help. Her younger sister, a Komsomol activist, when asked to take in Angelina, replied: ‘Let Soviet power bring her up, we do not need her.’ Natalia’s mother was even more hostile. She told her granddaughter to her face: ‘I hate your father, he is an enemy of the people, and I hate you as well.’ For several days, Natalia and her daughter slept on a bench in the park, until at last they were taken in by Andrei Grigorev and his wife, old friends of Aleksei from his student days at Moscow University’s Faculty of Medicine. At enormous personal risk, the Grigorevs concealed Angelina in the communal apartment where they lived, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. Angelina had no legal papers allowing her to remain in the Soviet capital, but the Grigorevs’ neighbours in the communal apartment (among them Molotov’s sister-in-law) turned a blind eye to the hideaway: it suited them to keep the doctors in the house. Leaving her daughter in Moscow, Natalia returned to Khabarovsk, where she was arrested a few weeks later.130

  Shamsuvali and Gulchira Tagirov were schoolteachers in the Tatar region of Barda, 140 kilometres south-west of Perm. Shamsuvali was a revolutionary activist who had played a leading role in the establishment of the kolkhoz in their village of Akbash. In 1936, Shamsuvali was arrested as a ‘Muslim nationalist’ along with thirty-four other Tatar teachers and religious leaders in the Barda area (he was shot in 1938). Gulchira was left on her own with six children, the eldest aged eleven and the youngest just a few weeks old. As one of the people in the village who could read (in Tatar and in Russian), Gulchira was respected by the villagers, who made sure that she had enough food to feed her family. Even the arresting officer, who was filled with remorse for having to arrest a good man like Tagirov, helped Gulchira and her family. He brought them milk or fed them at his house. Once a week he passed letters between Gulchira and Shamsuvali, who was imprisoned in Barda. ‘Forgive me,’ he wrote to Shamsuvali in a letter of his own, ‘I had no choice. They forced me to arrest you, even though I knew that you were innocent. Now I shall redeem my guilt and help your family.’ Gulchira stayed on as a teacher in the Akbash village school, although her lessons were often monitored by NKVD operatives; they checked for signs of Muslim nationalism in everything she said.

  In 1937, Gulchira and her six children were evicted from their house, following a denunciation by the chairman of the village Soviet. With their possessions on a horse and cart, they walked 20 kilometres to the village of Yekshur, where Shamsuvali’s mother lived with her eldest son in a large two-storeyed house with room to spare. Shamsuvali’s mother was an educated and religious woman: her house was full of books. But she refused to take them in. She blamed Gulchira for the arrest of her son. Having heard the rumours of her daughter-in-law’s growing friendship with the arresting officer, perhaps she suspected that Gulchira had played an active part in Shamsuvali’s arrest. Gulchira’s daughter, Rezeda, believes that her father’s relatives were motivated by the fear that Gulchira was an ‘enemy of the people’ who had been responsible for the arrest of her husband and who might endanger them as well. Shamsuvali’s mother told Gulchira that her house was full. She would not let her in, or even give her food for the children after their long walk. That night the family of Shamsuvali’s younger brother moved into the spare rooms on the second floor (he sold his own house in Akbash, where he was a trader, to consolidate the move). Turned away by her husband’s family, Gulchira and her children found a room to rent from a kolkhoz worker on the edge of the village. Shamsuvali’s mother came to visit them on one occasion but complained about the noise made by the children and did not come again. Gulchira and her children lived in Yekshur for fifteen years, but only rarely did they see the Tagirov family, who refused to talk to them. ‘The most painful thing,’ recalls Gulchira, ‘was to see them pass us on the street – surely there was no one to hear them there – but they still wouldn’t speak to us, not even say hello.’ Gulchira’s children grew up in the same village as their cousins but rarely mixed with them. ‘We went to school with them, but we never played with them, or went to their house,’ recalls Rezeda. ‘They were always cold towards us, and we were cold towards them.’131

  Gulchira Tagirova and her children (Rezeda centre), 1937. The photograph was taken in a studio in Sarapul and sent to Shamsuvali in prison

  Fear brought out the worst in people. Yet there were also acts of extraordinary kindness by colleagues, friends and neighbours, sometimes even strangers, who took enormous risks to help the families of ‘enemies of the people’. They took their children in, gave them food and money or put them up when they were evicted from their homes. There were Bolshevik officials and NKVD men who took pity on their victims’ families and tried their best to assist them by warning them of danger or tracking down arrested relatives.132

  In March 1937, the architect Mikhail Stroikov was rearrested in exile in Arkhangelsk. His wife Elena and their ten-year-old daughter Julia were taken in by an old friend of the family, Konstantin Artseulov, who was also living in exile in the town of Mozhaisk, 100 kilometres south-west of Moscow, with his wife Tatiana and their son Oleg, who was Julia’s age. Konstantin was unemployed. An artist by training, he had been dismissed from his job as a pilot in the Soviet air force shortly before his arrest and as an exile could not find work in Mozhaisk. The whole burden of supporting the two families fell on Tatiana, who worked as a teacher in Mozhaisk. ‘They sold everything they could in order to ensure that we were fed,’ recalls Julia. ‘They risked their own necks to take us in.’ Julia remained with the Artseulovs while her mother went in search of work. In November 1937, Konstantin was denounced by a neighbour for harbouring the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people’. He was rearrested, imprisoned and later shot. Still his wife Tatiana continued to shelter Julia, carefully concealing her from their malicious neighbours. Eventually, in 1938, Tatiana smuggled Julia to Moscow, where friends of Konstantin agreed to take her in until her mother found a job. Elena came for her that summer and took her to Pushkino, a small town north of Moscow, where Konstantin’s connections helped her find a job in the Moscow City Committee of Artists, an organization responsible for producing portraits of the Soviet leaders. Elena became one of the leading portraitists of the Soviet leadership – an ironic ending for the wife of an ‘enemy of the people’.133

  Oleg Liubchenko’s father, a Ukrainian journalist, was arrested in 1934 and shot in 1937. Exiled from Kiev, Oleg and his mother Vera ended up in Maloiaroslavets, a small town south-west of Moscow. They did not have a passport for Moscow, but they often went to stay there in a communal apartment on the Arbat, where Vera’s family, once well-known landowners in Riazan, had lived for several years in the 1920s. Vera’s sister still lived in the apartment. From 1936 to 1941 Oleg and his mother stayed in the flat illegally. All the inhabitants of the apartment were very welcoming, risking eviction and perhaps arrest for harbouring illegal immigrants. The elder of the apartment, an old Chekist called Klavdiia Kolchina, was particularly supportive. It was she who had originally invited Vera’s family to live in the apartment at the end of the Civil War, when she had come to Moscow from Riazan and had met them on the street. Klavdiia had known of Oleg’s father in Riazan, and was certain that he was innocent of the crimes for which he had been shot. Having been part of the Cheka, and knowing how they worked, she would often say: ‘We have laws but no legality.’ The head of the house committee was also well disposed, even though she was an active Communist. She was well aware that illegals were living in the flat but, recalls Oleg, on the rare occasions when he or his mother ventured into the courtyard, or when
the head of the house committee saw them entering through a side door, she would ‘look right past us with a stern expression, as if trying not to notice us’.134 There were lots of illegals in the housing blocks of the Arbat, a prestige area of the capital that was hit hard by the Great Terror.

  After Ilia Slavin was arrested in November 1937, his wife Esfir and their daughter Ida were ejected from their three-room apartment in the House of the Leningrad Soviet. They were moved to a tiny room, 8 metres square, in a communal apartment, without running water or electricity, in the distant outskirts of Leningrad. Five months later, Esfir was arrested too. She was imprisoned in the Kresty jail and then sentenced to eight years in the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for the Wives of Traitors to the Motherland (ALZhIR) in Kazakhstan. Suddenly, the sixteen-year-old Ida, who had lived the sheltered life of a professor’s daughter, was left on her own. ‘I was completely unprepared for the daily chores of existence,’ she recalls. ‘I did not even know the price of bread, or how to wash my clothes.’ Without any other relatives in Leningrad, Ida was unable to support herself; she could not even pay the rent on her small room. But she was saved by her classmates and their parents, who took turns to put her up for a few days (if they kept her any longer they would run the risk of being denounced by their neighbours for harbouring the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people’). For many of these families, housing and feeding an extra child was a real burden. For Ida the importance of their help was inestimable: ‘They not only gave me food and shelter, but the spiritual support I needed to survive.’

  Ida studied hard at school for the exams she had to pass to graduate to the tenth and final class, from which she could apply to a higher institute. With help from friends, she found a cleaning job, which enabled her to pay the rent for her small room. Every day, she would travel for three hours between home and school, and then another hour to get to her cleaning job. Two nights a week, she would stand in prison queues trying to find out where her parents had been taken, and if they were still alive.