The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Liza had already used up three of the four allotted pages of her letter to Zoia. She thought for a moment and then wrote on the final page in big capital letters:

  ZOIA, YOU ARE RIGHT. I AM GUILTY. JOIN THE KOMSOMOL. THIS IS THE LAST TIME I AM GOING TO WRITE TO YOU. BE HAPPY, YOU AND LIALIA. MOTHER.

  Liza showed the correspondence to Olga, and then banged her head on the table. Choking on her tears, she said: ‘It is better she hates me. How would she live without the Komsomol – an alien? She would hate Soviet power. It is better she hates me.’ From that day, recalls Olga, Liza ‘never said a word about her daughters and did not receive any more letters’.144

  For many children the arrest of a close relative raised all sorts of doubts. All the principles they had believed as ‘Soviet children’ were suddenly in conflict with what they knew of the people they loved.

  When her father was arrested as a ‘Trotskyist’, Vera Turkina did not know what to believe. Her mother and grandmother both accepted Aleksandr’s guilt. There were reports in the Soviet press about the criminal activities of her father, who was a well-known Bolshevik in Perm. Wherever Vera went, she heard people whispering about her, the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people’, behind her back. ‘My father became a source of shame,’ Vera remembers.

  People said to me that if he had been arrested, then he must be guilty of something. ‘There is no smoke without fire,’ everybody said. When my mother went to ask about my father at the NKVD offices, they told her: ‘Wait and see, he will confess to everything.’ I too assumed that he must be guilty. What else was I to believe?145

  Elga Torchinskaia was a model Soviet schoolgirl. She loved Stalin, venerated Pavlik Morozov and believed in the propaganda about ‘spies’ and ‘enemies’. She still thought this way when her father was arrested in October 1937. A veteran Bolshevik increasingly opposed to Stalin’s policies, he had never talked to her about his political opinions. In the Torchinsky household in Leningrad, as in many families, politics was not a subject for discussion in the presence of children. Elga thus had no perspective on the mass arrests beyond the one she had learned in school – she had no other way to understand the reasons for the arrest of her father, no way of her own to question why it had happened. In 1938, two of Elga’s uncles were arrested. One of them returned from the labour camps in 1939 and told Elga awful stories about his torture by the NKVD. Even this could not shake Elga from her conviction that if someone was arrested, it ‘must have been for something he had done’. In 1939, when she turned sixteen, Elga applied to join the Komsomol. In her application she declared that her father was an ‘enemy of the people’, and falsely claimed that he was divorced from her mother. Her declaration was a renunciation of sorts, but, as Elga now admits, she was confused at the time, she was afraid to question anything and it was from ignorance that she rejected him. ‘We were all zombies – that is what I think. My God, we were just young girls. We had been educated by the Komsomol. We believed everything we were told.’146

  The silence, the lack of any news or information, exacerbated a family’s uncertainty. Without word from the arrested person or anything to prove his innocence, relatives had nothing to cling to, nothing to oppose the public assumption of guilt.

  Nina Kosterina was the daughter of a long-time Bolshevik. She had a model Soviet childhood, joining the Komsomol at the end of 1936, just as the first tremors of the Terror began to register on her political consciousness. When her uncle was arrested, Nina struggled to make sense of the event. She wrote in her diary on 25 March 1937:

  Something frightful and incomprehensible has happened. They say that Uncle Misha was involved with some counter-revolutionary organization. What is going on? Uncle Misha – a member of the Party from the very first days of the Revolution – and suddenly an enemy of the people!

  When their landlord was arrested, Nina wondered how she would react if the arrests came closer to home:

  Something strange is happening. I thought and thought, and came to the conclusion: if my father also turns out to be a Trotskyist and an enemy of his country, I shall not feel sorry for him! I write this, but (I confess) there is a gnawing worm of doubt.

  In December 1937, Nina’s father was expelled from the Party and dismissed from his official position. Anticipating his arrest, he wrote to Nina to warn her: ‘you must be sure that your father was never a scoundrel… and has never blemished his name by anything dirty or base’. The letter played a crucial role: although confused and in despair, Nina was able to cling to the belief in her father’s innocence when he was finally arrested, in September 1938. As she noted in her diary:

  September 7

  What an ominous darkness has shrouded my whole life. Father’s arrest is such a blow… Until now I have always carried my head high and with honour, but now… Now Akhmetev [a classmate] can say to me, ‘We’re comrades in misfortune!’ And just to think how I despised him and despised his father, a Trotskyist. The nightmare thought oppresses me day and night: is my father also an enemy? No, it cannot be, I don’t believe it! It’s all a terrible mistake!

  Nina’s father spent two years in prison waiting for his ‘trial’ by a troika, which sentenced him to five years in a labour camp as a ‘socially dangerous element’. In November 1940, he wrote his first letter home. Nina was touched by the beauty of the letter, in which she felt the spirit of her father, his ‘strength and freshness’, despite the hardships of the camp. But her mother was annoyed and merely asked: ‘Is he guilty, or is he not guilty? If he’s innocent, why doesn’t he appeal against the sentence?’ The next letter effectively answered her mother’s question. ‘There is nothing more to be said about my case,’ Nina’s father wrote. ‘There is no case, only a soap bubble in the shape of an elephant. I cannot refute what is not, was not, and could never have been.’147

  The disappearance of a father and a husband placed enormous strain on families. Wives renounced husbands who had been arrested, not necessarily because they thought their spouses might be ‘enemies of the people’, although they may have had that thought, but because it made survival easier and gave protection to their families (many husbands for this reason advised wives to renounce them). The state put pressure on the wives of ‘enemies’ to renounce their husbands publicly. Failure to do so could have serious consequences. Some women were arrested as the ‘wives of enemies’ and sent to labour camps, with or without their children. Others were evicted from their homes, dismissed from jobs, deprived of rations and civil rights. Financial pressures were applied as well: salaries were docked, savings frozen and rents raised. To encourage women to renounce their husbands, the cost of a divorce, which normally would set a couple back 500 roubles, was reduced to just 3 roubles (the price of a canteen meal) in cases of divorce from a prisoner.148

  It took extraordinary resilience, and not a little bravery, for women to resist these pressures and stand by their husbands. Irina and Vasily Dudarev had been married for nearly fifteen years when Vasily was arrested in 1937. They had met in Smolensk in the early 1920s, when both of them were training to become teachers. A Bolshevik from the Civil War, Vasily became a senior Party figure in Orel. In 1933, he was sent to Azov, a town near Rostov at the mouth of the River Don, where he became the Party boss. Irina worked in a hosiery factory. She was not a political person, but out of love for Vasily she joined the Party and became a ‘Party wife’. When he was arrested, Irina went in search of him – not just at the jails but also at the railway depots of Rostov and Bataisk, 30 kilometres away, where on Sunday evenings the trains containing prisoners were prepared for their departure to the labour camps:

  I would walk along the tracks beside the trains in the hope of finding my husband so that I could give him some things for the journey. I saw many convoys. The ice-coated goods wagons were nailed shut; even the windows at the top were blocked with metal strips, leaving just a little crack. From the wagons I could hear the muffled hum of voices. As I passed along the train, I would call out: ‘Is Dudar
ev there?’ The hum would die away, and sometimes a voice would answer, ‘No.’… But then one day a voice answered, ‘Dudarev? Yes.’ It was the train guard… I took out the clean clothes I had prepared and handed them in a little bag to the guard. He let me write a note, ‘on business affairs’. I was so happy that Vasily would know that I was looking for him, and that I was thinking about him. I had been so afraid that, without news from me, he would think I had renounced him… In my note I wrote a list of the things I had handed to the guard and signed off: ‘All are well. I kiss you.’ A few minutes later the guard returned my bag with the note. On the other side was written in Vasily’s hand: ‘Got all. Thank you.’

  Irina never doubted her husband’s innocence. She was summoned repeatedly by the NKVD, presented with the ‘evidence’ of his criminal activities and threatened with arrest if she failed to denounce him, but she refused every time. Irina recalls a Party meeting at her factory where she was called upon to disclose her husband’s crimes against the state. In similar circumstances most wives claimed that they had never known about their husband’s crimes, but Irina courageously denied that hers had committed any crime:

  I sat alone at one end of the table, while everybody else sat as close as they could to the committee leaders at the other end. No one would talk to me. One of the Party secretaries informed the meeting that Dudarev had been arrested as an enemy of the people, and that now they had to decide about me. The Party members spoke in turn. They did not have much to say except slogans. About me they said nothing, except that I had deceived the Party. They demanded that I tell them about my husband’s crimes and explain why I had concealed them. No one looked at me. Trying to stay calm, I answered briefly, thinking very carefully about every word. I said that I had lived with my husband for fifteen years, that I knew him to be a good Communist, that through his influence I had joined the Party and that I did not believe for a moment that he had been involved in anything wrong. This gave rise to a lot of muttering. Someone shouted: ‘But he has been arrested!’ As if that were proof of guilt. One by one they tried to convince me that it was my Party duty to disclose Dudarev’s crimes. But no one dared to state the charges against him… Again and again they asked me to denounce Dudarev as an enemy of the people. Each time I refused.

  Irina was expelled from the Party. She lost her position on the management committee of her factory and was demoted to a poorly paid job in the accounts department. A few days later, the town Soviet levied a large back-tax on her apartment, explaining that it was to pay for the ‘surplus living space’ she and her husband had occupied for several years. In July 1938, Irina was arrested ‘for failing to denounce the enemy activities of her husband’. She was released the following December and returned to Smolensk.149 Dudarev was shot in 1937.*

  Julia Piatnitskaia did not know what to believe about her husband after his arrest. She wanted to think the best of him, but the desperate position in which Osip had left her made it hard not to bear him a grudge – as her sons did – for bringing such misfortune on the family. Sixteen-year-old Igor felt let down by his father, whose arrest had isolated him from his friends in the Komsomol. Twelve-year-old Vladimir blamed his father for ruining his dreams of a career in the Red Army. ‘Vova [Vladimir] hates his father bitterly and feels sorry for Igor,’ Julia wrote in her diary. Bullied by his former friends and frequently in trouble at school, Vladimir was shaken by an incident in the Pioneers: the leader had questioned him about his father, and when Vladimir refused to answer, declared, for everyone to hear: ‘Your father is an enemy of the people. It is now your duty to decide your relation towards him.’

  Julia and Vladimir had constant fights. On one occasion, when Vladimir was angry because his mother had refused to write to Yezhov for the return of his toy gun and some military books, which had been confiscated by the NKVD during the house search, he said to her in anger: ‘It is a shame they have not shot Papa, since he is an enemy of the people.’ On another, when he came home with a poor mark from school, Julia lost her temper and swore at Vladimir. She told him, as she put it in her diary, ‘that his bad behaviour showed he was the son of an enemy of the people.’ Bursting into tears, Vladimir replied: ‘Is it my fault that I was born the son of an enemy? I don’t want you as my mother any more, I am going to an orphanage.’ Julia threatened to send him off to bed with just a crust of bread. Vladimir said he would ‘cut her throat’. Then she hit him twice across the face.150

  Julia was at the end of her rope. Evicted from their flat and struggling to find a proper job, she began to question her husband even more intensely. ‘There is only one thought in my head – who is Piatnitsky?’ Julia asked herself.

  20 July 1937

  … Yesterday evening I thought about Piatnitsky and I was full of bitterness: how could he have let us fall into such a shameful mess? How can it be that he worked with those people and knew their methods, and yet could not foresee that they would condemn us to a life of torment and hunger?… One could bear a bitter grudge against Piatnitsky. He let his children be destroyed; he lost all our money, and it wasn’t much to begin with. But who exactly are these men who have stolen all our things? Authority now is nothing but arbitrary terror – and everybody is afraid. I am going mad. What am I thinking? What am I thinking?151

  For six months Julia carried on this self-interrogation in her diary, trying to work out who her husband really was. Informed that he had been charged with espionage and counter-revolutionary activities on 7 February 1938, Julia wrote in her diary:

  Who is he? If he is a professional revolutionary, as he claimed to be, this man I knew for seventeen years, then he was unfortunate: he was surrounded by spies and enemies, who sabotaged his work, and that of many others, and he just didn’t see it… But evidently Piatnitsky never was a professional revolutionary, but a professional scoundrel and a spy, which explains why he was so closed and severe as a man. Evidently, he was not the man we thought he was… And all of us – I, his wife, the children – had no real significance for him.152

  Igor was arrested on 9 February 1938. He was in his classroom at school when two soldiers came for him. Igor was imprisoned in the Butyrki jail. Consumed by worry for her son, Julia fell into complete despair. According to Vladimir, she had a nervous breakdown – she spent whole days in bed and often thought of suicide.153 The only thing that kept her going was the idea of living for her sons, which she repeated like a mantra in her diary. ‘It would be best to die,’ she wrote on 9 March. ‘But that would leave my Vovka and Igor without a human being in the world. I’m all they have, and that means that I must fight to stay alive.’ Yet there were moments when Julia felt so despondent that the only salvation she could imagine was to break all human ties, even with her sons:

  17 February 1938

  Last night I thought I had found the solution: not death, though that is the easiest and most appealing solution, given my weak will and deep despair… but this idea: the children are not necessary: give Vovka to the state and live just for work – work ceaselessly, take time only for reading, live close to nature… have no feelings for any human being. It seemed such a good solution – to spend oneself in work, and not to have anybody close for them to take away. Why do I have Vovka and what good am I to him? I am buried by a mountain much too big to enjoy the life of a normal human being, to live for Vovka. He just wants to live, to have friends, the sun, a cosy home, a meaningful existence, but I – I am the wife of a counter-revolutionary.154

  Julia tried to figure out the reasons for the arrest of Osip and Igor. Unlike Vladimir, she could not bring herself to hate Osip as an ‘enemy of the people’. She noted in her diary: ‘Vovka torments me because I am unable to hate Piatnitsky; at first I thought that I would surely end up hating him, but in the end I have too many doubts.’ She tried to reason with Vladimir, arguing that his father ‘could be innocent and they made a mistake, or maybe he was deceived by the enemies’.155 Julia believed in the existence of ‘enemies of the people’. She o
ften pointed out ‘suspicious’ people in her diary, and she had no doubts about the justice of the Soviet courts. During the Bukharin trial, she was convinced that the ‘evil-doers’ had been rightly sentenced to be shot. Politically, she was naive, slow to understand the reality that engulfed her. She was more than willing to make Bukharin a scapegoat for the catastrophe that had destroyed her family. Commenting on the execution of Bukharin and his co-defendants in March 1938, Julia thought that ‘the spilling of their evil blood’ was ‘too small a price for them to pay for the suffering the Party has endured’.

  Today they are going to erase them from this earth, but that won’t do much to reduce my hatred. I would give them an awful death: build a special cage for them in a museum for counter-revolutionaries, and let us come and gawk at them… That would be unbearable for them: citizens coming to stare at them as if they were animals. Our hatred for them would never cease. Let them see how we go on working to build a better life, how we are all united, how we love our leaders, leaders who are not traitors. Let them see how we struggle against Fascism while they do nothing but feed themselves like animals, for they are not worthy to be called people.

  Picturing the ‘better life’ of the future, when ‘only honest people will be allowed to live and work’, Julia saw some hope for her own family:

  Maybe Igor will return, and Piatnitsky as well – if, that is, he is honest and, of course, innocent of the crimes which were committed by so many enemies, or of failing to detect all these reptiles; if his intentions were honest, then of course he will return. How I’d like to know! Piatnitsky – are you guilty in any way? Did you disagree with the Party line? Were you opposed to even one of our leaders? How much easier my life would be, if I knew the truth. And as far as Igor is concerned, I think of the words of F—. ‘Everything that is well made will withstand the fire. And that which doesn’t, we don’t need.’156