The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Julia resolved to place her faith in the fire: if Osip was innocent, he too would survive the Terror.

  Piatnitsky was imprisoned in the Butyrki jail, the same prison where his son was held. Lev Razgon encountered him in a crowded cell (built for twenty-five but housing sixty-seven) at the start of April 1938. Razgon saw a ‘thin and crooked old man [Piatnitsky was then fifty-six] who bore the marks of battle in his face’.

  [Piatnitsky] explained, when he saw me looking at his face, that these were the marks left by the metal buckle of his interrogator’s belt. I had seen Piatnitsky in the early months of 1937… The man who stood before me now was totally unrecognizable as the man I had seen before. Only the eyes were the same bright, lively eyes, though now much more sad. They betrayed an immense spiritual suffering.

  Piatnitsky asked about Razgon’s case, about how he had been incriminated, and then Razgon asked him about his:

  He went silent. Then he said that he had no illusions about his fate, that his case was moving to a close and he was prepared. He told me how they questioned him without a break, how they tortured him, beating out of him exactly what they needed, and threatening to beat him to death. He hadn’t finished talking when they came for him again.157

  On 10 April, Piatnitsky was transferred to the Lefortovo prison, where he was systematically tortured and interrogated every night from 12 April until his trial at the end of July. According to his main interrogator, who denied using physical measures of coercion, Piatnitsky behaved ‘calmly and with restraint, but once, when he was in a state of agitation for some reason, he asked me for permission to have a drink, and going up to the water carafe, struck himself on the head with it’.158 Osip was tried by the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Soviet, along with 137 other prisoners, on 27 July. He was charged with being one of the leaders of a Fascist spy-ring of Trotskyists and Rightists in the Comintern. A list of names of the convicted was sent by Yezhov to Stalin. At the top of the list, preserved in the Presidential Archives in the Kremlin, there is a brief handwritten order: ‘Shoot all 138. I. St[alin]. V. Molotov.’159

  None of this was known to Julia. She did not even know that Piatnitsky was being held in the Butyrki when she joined the queues outside its gates to hand in a parcel for her son. The longer she heard nothing from Osip, the harder it became for her to hold on to the hope that he was innocent. Everybody told her to forget Osip, to think about herself and her two sons. On 12 April, the night Osip’s torture recommenced in the Lefortovo prison, Julia had a nightmare. She dreamed that she was being tormented by a cat. She thought the dream was significant and wondered if it meant that her son Igor was being tortured in the Butyrki (she had heard rumours about such things from the women in the prison queues). The thought of Igor’s suffering altered Julia’s feelings towards Osip, as she recorded in her diary:

  My life has become an endless downward spiral. I talk with myself, in a whisper, and feel complete despair – for Piatnitsa [Piatnitsky] and Igor, but especially for my poor boy. He is spending his seventeeth spring in a miserable, dark and dirty prison, in a cell with strangers. The main thing is that he is innocent. Piatnitsky has lived his life – he failed to recognize the enemies who surrounded him, or became degenerate, which is not so astonishing, because he gave himself to politics, but Igor…160

  The idea that it was too late to do anything for Osip reinforced Julia’s determination to do whatever necessary to help Igor, whose life was still ahead of him. She had accepted the possibility of her husband’s guilt. But she was not prepared to accept that her sixteen-year-old son could have been involved in any crime. Julia decided to renounce her husband in the hope that it would help save her son.

  She went to the procurator’s office in Moscow. Informed that Piatnitsky had committed a serious crime against the state, Julia replied: ‘If that is the case, he means nothing to me any more.’ The procurator advised Julia to begin a new life. She told him she would like to work for the NKVD, and he encouraged her to make a formal application, promising to support it. Julia saw the procurator as a sympathetic man:

  I shook his hand warmly, though perhaps this was to display too much sentiment, something which I have never been able to control – but I felt close to this man, whose task is difficult but necessary, and I wanted to express my respect for him as a comrade, to show my moral support for those comrades who are rooting out the swine from our Party. Again I emphasize: despite my own suffering, and despite the possibility that innocents are being sacrificed (let one of these not be my Igor!), I must be true to principles, I must stay disciplined and patient, and I must, I absolutely must, find a way to make an active contribution, or else there will be no place for me among people.

  Once she had adandoned her husband, Julia was prepared to think the worst of him. She wrote in her diary on 16 April:

  Oh, I just can’t understand it! But if it is so, then how I despise him, how I hate his base and cowardly, yet to me incomprehensible, soul!… Oh, what a good act he put on! Now I understand why he surrounded himself with the ‘warm companionship’ of all those spies, provocateurs and bureaucrats. But surely he had no real friends. He was essentially a gloomy man who never opened himself to me… Maybe he never loved the Party, maybe he never had its interests at heart? But what about us, me and the children, what was he thinking?161

  Three weeks later, Igor was hauled before a three-man tribunal and charged with organizing a counter-revolutionary student group – a charge so absurd that even the tribunal threw it out, though it sentenced Igor to five years in a labour camp on the lesser and much vaguer charge of anti-Soviet agitation.* Julia was told of her son’s conviction on 27 May. She became hysterical and demanded that the procurator arrest her as well: ‘If he is guilty, so am I.’ Reflecting on events that evening, Julia groped towards an understanding of the Terror:

  Perhaps Piatnitsky really was bad, and we must all perish on his account. But it is hard to die when I do not know who Piatnitsky really is, nor what crime Igor committed. He could not have done anything wrong. But then why did they take him? Maybe as someone who might become a criminal, because he is the son of an enemy… Maybe it’s a way of forcefully mobilizing that part of the population which is not trusted by the state but whose labour can be used? I don’t know, but it is logical. Of course if that is the case then Igor, and all the other people like him, will never come back. They serve a useful purpose to the state, but they depart from life. Anyway it is terrifying to have to remain behind – to have to wait and not to know.162

  Julia herself was arrested on 27 October 1938. She was thirty-nine years old. Her diary was seized at the time of her arrest and used as evidence to convict her of conspiring with her husband against the government. She was sent to the Kandalaksha labour camp in the far northern region of Murmansk. Vladimir was sent with her, although he was very ill, having just recovered from an operation, and had to be taken from his bed. At Kandalaksha Vladimir was kept in the barracks and fed twice a day by an NKVD guard while Julia went to work on the construction of Niva-GES, a hydro-electric station near the camp. Shortly after their arrival Vladimir escaped and made his way back to Moscow, where he stayed with various schoolfriends, including the family of Yevgeny Loginov, whose father worked in Stalin’s personal secretariat. Earlier the Loginovs had turned their back on the Piatnitskys, but now something made them change their minds. Common decency perhaps. Vladimir stayed with the Loginovs for three months. Then, one evening, he overheard a conversation between the Loginovs: Yevgeny’s father had got into trouble for taking in Piatnitsky’s son. To save them from any more trouble, Vladimir turned himself in to the Moscow Soviet. The official to whom he spoke was an old comrade of Piatnitsky from October 1917. He ordered sandwiches for Vladimir and then called the police. Vladimir was taken to the NKVD detention centre in the old Danilov Monastery, from which the children of ‘enemies of the people’ were sent on to orphanages across the Soviet Union.163

  In March 1939, Julia was denounced b
y three co-workers at Niva-GES. They claimed that she had said that her husband had been wrongly arrested, that he was innocent, and that he had considered Stalin to be unfit as a leader of the proletariat. Convicted of anti-Soviet agitation, Julia was sentenced to five years in the Karaganda labour camp in Kazakhstan. Igor was a prisoner in the industrial section of the camp, and somehow Julia arranged a meeting with him there. ‘We spent a remarkable and very sad day together,’ recalls Igor, ‘and then she went back [to the women’s section of the camp].’ Physically frail and mentally unbalanced, Julia was in no condition to withstand the hardships of camp life. She was still beautiful and attracted the attention of the camp commandant (which may explain why she had been allowed to visit Igor); but she refused his sexual demands, for which he punished her by sending her to work as a manual labourer in the construction of a dam. For sixteen hours every day she stood waist-high in freezing water, digging earth. She became ill and died on an unrecorded date in the winter of 1940.

  In 1958, after his release from the labour camps, Igor was visited by an old acquaintance of the family, a woman called Zina, who had seen his mother in the Karaganda camp, where she too was a prisoner. Zina told Igor that Julia had died in the camp hospital and that she was buried in a mass grave. In 1986, Igor received another visit from Zina, by this time a woman of eighty. She told him that on the previous occasion she had lied about his mother, because Julia, before she died, had made her promise to spare Igor the awful details of her death (and because, as Zina now admitted, she had been afraid to speak the truth). But recently Zina had seen Julia in her dreams – Julia had asked her about her son – and she saw this as a sign that she should tell Igor about his mother’s final days. Julia had not died in hospital. In December 1940, Zina had gone to look for Julia in the Karaganda camp. No one wanted to tell her where she was, but then one woman pointed to a sheep-pen on the steppe and said that she could be found there. Zina walked into the pen. Amongst the sheep, lying on the freezing ground, was Julia:

  She was dying, her whole body was blown up with fever, she was burning hot and shaking. The sheep stood guard around her but offered no protection from the wind and snow, which lay around in mounds. I crouched beside her, she tried to raise herself but did not have the strength. I took her hand and tried to warm it with my breath.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. I told her my name and said only that I came from you, that you had asked me to find her…

  How she stirred: ‘Igor – my boy,’ she whispered from her frozen lips. ‘My little boy, help him, I beseech you, help him to survive.’ I calmed her down and promised to look after you, as if that depended on me. ‘Give me your word,’ Julia whispered. ‘Do not tell him how his mother died. Give me your word…’

  She was half-delirious. I crouched down beside her and promised her.

  Then from behind me a guard shouted: ‘Where did you come from? How did you get here?’ The guard grabbed me and frog-marched me out of the sheep-pen. ‘Who are you?’

  I explained that I had come as the section leader of a tool workshop and had found the woman accidentally. But I was detained. They told me that I should not breathe a word about what I had seen: ‘Shut your mouth, and say nothing!’

  Julia died in the sheep-pen. She had been left there when she fell ill, and no one was allowed to visit her. She was buried where she died.164

  5

  Remnants of Terror

  (1938–41)

  1

  It was a warm summer evening, 28 July 1938, and Nelly’s grandmother had gone to pick the raspberries in the garden, leaving her in charge of her sister Angelina while her mother, Zinaida Bushueva, nursed her baby brother and prepared the meal. Since the arrest of her father, nine months earlier, Nelly had grown used to helping in the house, although she was only four years old. Zinaida was breast-feeding Slava when the front door opened and two NKVD soldiers appeared. They told her to get dressed, and took her with the children to the NKVD headquarters in the centre of Perm. A few minutes later, Nelly’s grandmother returned with the raspberries: the house was empty, her family had gone.

  At the NKVD building the interrogator arranged for the two girls to be sent to children’s homes. ‘Your mama is going away on a long work trip,’ he explained to Nelly. ‘You will not see her again.’ Zinaida became hysterical. When two guards came to take away the girls she began to scream and bite the other guards who held her down. As Nelly was led away, she looked back to see her mother being hit across the face. The two sisters were sent to different homes – Nelly to a Jewish orphanage (on account of her darker looks), Angelina to a nearby children’s home. It was NKVD policy to break up the families of ‘enemies of the people’ and to give the children a new identity.

  Zinaida was allowed to keep Slava – he had pneumonia and needed to be nursed by her. For three weeks, the mother and her baby son were held in a crowded prison cell. Zinaida was charged with failing to denounce her husband and sentenced to eight years in the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland (ALZhIR), part of the Karaganda camp complex in Kazakhstan. She was in a large

  Angelina and Nelly Bushueva, 1937

  convoy of female prisoners transferred from Perm to Akmolinsk in September 1938. On the day of their departure, they were made to kneel for several hours in one of the city’s squares while they awaited transportation in small groups by horse and cart to the station. The residents of Perm stood around and watched the spectacle, but no one tried to help the prisoners, though Zinaida’s mother, who had spotted her with Slava in the middle of the square, tried to get one of the guards to take a pullover for her. ‘Get away, old woman,’ the guard said, pushing her away with the point of his gun. At the station the convoy was loaded into cattle trucks. It took ten days for the train to get to Akmolinsk, a journey of 1,500 kilometres. Zinaida was in a truck with common criminals. At first they harassed her and tried to take her baby, believing it would get them released early from the camp, but after a few days, as Slava became sicker, they took pity on the mother and shouted for the guards to bring milk for her baby. On their arrival at the camp, Zinaida was forced to give up Slava to the orphanage at Dolinka, the administrative centre of the Karaganda camps. She did not see him for the next five years. A qualified accountant, Zinaida was offered work in the camp offices, a privileged position for a prisoner, but she begged to be employed in the heaviest agricultural work instead. ‘I will lose my mind if I have time to think,’ Zinaida explained to the camp commandant. ‘I have lost my three children. Let me forget myself in manual labour.’

  After she had seen her daughter kneeling with Slava in the square, Zinaida’s mother went in search of Angelina and Nelly. With the help of her two sons, she found Nelly after a few weeks. But it was not until the spring of 1940 that she found Angelina, who by then, at the age of four, was old enough to recall something of the incident:

  My cousin Gera, the son of uncle Vitia, lived near the orphanage. One day the orphanage children were out walking by the river, we walked in pairs in a long column, and I was at the very end. Gera and his parents were also out by the river. He recognized me immediately. He shouted, ‘Look, there’s our Aka!’ Everybody stopped. There was quite a scene. The women from the orphanage would not let my relatives come near me, but uncle Vitia spoke to one of them, who said that I was called Alei, or Angelina, they were not sure…

  Granny began to write appeals to the orphanage and then one day she came to get me… I remember the day. She brought a pair of red shoes with sparkly buckles and put them on my feet. I lifted up my feet and looked at the soles of the shoes – they were so smooth and clean and red. I would brush the dust from them. I wanted to take off the shoes and lick their soles, because they were such a bright colour, but Granny said: ‘Enough, leave your shoes alone, let’s go and find your sister Nelly.’ I still recall my confusion – what was a sister? Who was Nelly? I had no idea. When we left the orphanage there was a girl waiting by the entrance. Granny said, ‘T
his is Nelly, your sister.’ I said, ‘So?’ The only thing I understood was that she was called Nelly, but not what a sister was. The girl came up to me. She had short black hair. She wore a grey raincoat. She was chewing the end of the collar. And I said: ‘Why is she eating the collar?’ And Granny scolded her: ‘Again chewing your collar!’1

  Angelina’s childhood memories are dominated by the feeling of hunger. The daily fare in the orphanage had been so poor (dry brown bread and a thin grey gruel) that Angelina’s first reaction to her bright red shoes was to try to eat them like a tomato. Things were not much better when she went to live with Nelly and her grandmother, who was too old and sick to work and lived in desperate poverty in a small room in a communal apartment, having been evicted from the family home following the arrest of Zinaida in 1938. By 1941 there were near-famine conditions in Perm (from 1940 known as Molotov). Many of the central avenues had been converted into vegetable allotments for selected residents, but Angelina’s grandmother was not one of these. ‘We learned to eat all sorts of things,’ recalls Angelina: ‘the spring leaves of linden trees; grass and moss; potato peelings which we collected at night from the rubbish bins of people who were better off than us.’ Angelina was conscious of her hunger as a source of shame and degradation. It was hunger that defined her as a lower class of human being rather than the arrest of her parents as ‘enemies of the people’ – a concept which in any case she was too young to understand. Angelina was bullied by a gang of boys from the house across the street where factory workers lived. The boys knew that Angelina took the peelings from their bins, and they always mocked her about it when she passed them on the street. Angelina learned to hold her tongue and not answer back. But one day the leader of the gang, the biggest of the boys who came from a family of factory officials, gave a piece of buttered bread to a beggar on the street. ‘He did it just for me to see,’ recalls Angelina, ‘he wanted to humiliate me, and I could not help myself; the sight of buttered bread was just too much, I would have given anything to have it for myself and could not bear to see it go to a beggar. I shouted at the boys: “What are you doing? There is butter on that bread!” They all laughed at me.’2