The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  For most teenagers it was their admission to the Komsomol that symbolized their transition from children of an ‘enemy of the people’ to ‘Soviet citizens’. Galina Adasinskaia was seventeen when her father was arrested in February 1938. Galina’s parents were active oppositionists and there was no expectation that she would become a member of the Communist youth organization. Exiled with her mother from her native Leningrad to Iaroslavl, Galina felt acutely the stigma of repression and tried to overcome it by applying to the Komsomol nonetheless. She wrote to the Komsomol committee at her school, asking them, as she put it, to ‘look into my case’ (i.e. to examine her appeal to join in the light of her father’s arrest). There was in this, as she admits, a conscious element of self-purging, an open declaration of her ‘spoilt biography’ in the hope of forgiveness and salvation by the collective. At the Komsomol meeting to discuss her appeal, the leaders ruled that Galina ‘should be disqualified from membership as an enemy of the people’. But one of her classmates protested, and threatened that all the students would leave if Adasinskaia was excluded. ‘The Party instructor became red with rage,’ recalls Galina:

  He sat there on his stool and began to shout: ‘What is this? A provocation! Lack of vigilance!’ But I was allowed to join the Komsomol. I was even elected as the class organizer and our organization took first place [in the socialist competition] at school.

  For Galina this was the moment she was brought back into the collective fold. When she herself was arrested in 1941, she recalls, ‘my investigator’s eyes practically fell out when he saw my Komsomol record’.37

  The renunciation of family traditions and beliefs was usually the sacrifice required for entry into Soviet society. Liuba Tetiueva was born in 1923, the fourth child in the family of an Orthodox priest in the town of Cherdyn, in the northern Urals. Liuba’s father, Aleksandr, was arrested in 1922 and held in prison for the best part of a year. After his release he was put under pressure by OGPU to become an informer and write reports on his own parishioners, but he refused. When his church was taken over by the obnovlentsy, church reformers supported by the regime, Aleksandr was arrested for a second time but released a few months later in the autumn of 1929. Liuba’s mother, Klavdiia, was subsequently dismissed from her job in the Cherdyn Museum, and her brother Viktor was expelled from school as the son of a ‘class enemy’. In 1930, Aleksandr, eager to protect his family by distancing himself, took his son and moved to the town of Chermoz. In the hope of improving the boy’s prospects Aleksandr gave Viktor up for adoption to a family of workers active in the Church; as a ‘workers’ son’ Viktor finished seventh class at school and qualified as a teacher. The rest of the family also left Cherdyn, where they faced ruination, and went to live with Klavdiia’s mother in Solikamsk, a new industrial town 100 kilometres to the south.

  Growing up in Solikamsk, Liuba was brought up to ‘know her place’.

  Mama constantly reminded me that I was the daughter of a priest, that I should be careful not to mix with people, not to trust them, or to speak with them about my family. My place was to be modest. She used to say: ‘Others are allowed but you are not.’

  The family was very poor. Klavdiia worked as an instructor in likbez (an organization established to end illiteracy among adults) but her pay was not enough to feed the family without a ration card. They managed to survive thanks to small sums from Aleksandr, who worked in Chermoz as a priest. Then, in August 1937, Aleksandr was arrested yet again. In October he was shot. Klavdiia and the children kept going by selling their last possessions and growing vegetables. Help finally came in the form of money sent by some of Aleksandr’s old parishioners – peasants helped by the Church during collectivization.

  Liuba had seen her father only once after he moved to Chermoz. She visited him there in June 1937, a few weeks before his arrest. ‘Papa was upset by my ignorance of religion,’ recalls Liuba. ‘He tried to teach me Old Church Slavonic, and I resisted. It was the first and last religious lesson in my life.’ Years of repression had made Liuba want to break away from her family background. During the first year at her new school in Solikamsk she had been the target of an anti-religious propaganda campaign: the teacher would point to Liuba and tell the other children that they would all turn out as badly as she had, if they were exposed to religion. Bullied by the other children, Liuba was reduced to ‘such a state of fear and hysteria’, as she herself recalls, that

  I was afraid to go to school. Eventually my mother and grandmother decided not to take me to church any longer; they told me it was best to have one education, and that I was to believe everything I was told about religion at my school.

  Liuba joined the Pioneers. She was proud to wear the scarf, a sign of her inclusion, and became an activist, even taking part in demonstrations against the Church in 1938, when banners called for ‘Death to all the priests!’ Liuba became a teacher – the chosen profession of three of Aleksandr’s four children. For nearly fifty years she taught the Party line against the Church. Looking back, Liuba is filled with remorse for having turned her back on her family’s traditions and beliefs.* ‘I always thought: how much easier it would have been for me if my father had been a teacher rather than a priest, if I had had a father, just like every other girl.’38 Compared with her brother Viktor, who formally renounced his father at a meeting of the Komsomol, it could be said that Liuba only did what was absolutely necessary to survive in Soviet society.

  Becoming a Soviet activist was a common survival strategy among children of ‘enemies of the people’. It both deflected political suspicions from their vulnerability and enabled them to overcome their fear.

  Elizaveta Delibash was born in 1928 in Minusinsk, Siberia, where her parents were then living in exile. Her father, Aleksandr Iosilevich, was the son of a Leningrad printer, a veteran Bolshevik and Cheka official from the beginning of the Soviet regime and the partner of Elizaveta Drabkina (the teenager who had found her father in the Smolny Institute in October 1917), until he fell in love with Nina Delibash, the daughter of a minor Georgian official, and married her in 1925. Two years later, Aleksandr was arrested after falling out with his former OGPU employers (he had left the police to study economics in Moscow in 1926). Exiled to Siberia, he was followed there by Nina, who was pregnant with their daughter. In 1928, Nina and her baby went back to the Soviet capital, followed after his release by Aleksandr, who found a job in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. In 1930, Aleksandr was rearrested and sentenced to ten years in the labour camp at Sukhobezvodny, part of the Vetlag Gulag complex near Gorkii. Nina was arrested at the same time and sent to a series of ‘special settlements’ in Siberia, from which she returned to Moscow in 1932. Elizaveta stayed with her father’s family in Leningrad, occasionally visiting her mother in exile or in Moscow, until 1935, when she and Nina rejoined Aleksandr in the Sukhobezvodny camp. Nina worked as a volunteer, and the family lived together in the barracks of the camp, where Elizaveta went to school. But then, in April 1936, Elizaveta’s parents were both rearrested. Aleksandr was executed in May 1937; Nina was sentenced to ten years in the Solovetsky labour camp, where she was shot in November 1937.

  After the arrest of her parents, Elizaveta was saved from being sent to an orphanage by one of the other prisoners at Sukhobezvodny who brought her back to Leningrad after her release in 1936. Elizaveta stayed with various relatives – first with an uncle Grigorii (who was arrested in April 1937); then with an aunt Margo (who was arrested in July); and then with an aunt Raia (who was arrested in August) – whereupon some distant relatives rescued her from Leningrad and took her off to their dacha near Moscow, where they concealed her from the NKVD, before sending her to her mother’s family in Tbilisi. Passed between these relatives, unaware of their concern to get her out of the police’s way, she began to feel like an unwanted child.

  Elizaveta’s grandparents were plain folk – her grandfather was of peasant origin and her grandmother the daughter of a trader – but they had both been educated and they had
imbibed the liberal-Christian values of the intelligentsia in Tbilisi. Elizaveta did not go to school but was taught at home by her grandmother, who had been a teacher in the Tbilisi Gymnasium before 1917. Her grandparents had no illusions about the purges. They told her that her parents were innocent and decent people who had been punished unjustly. Nina wrote twice to her parents from the Solovetsky camp. She added a few words of comfort and encouragement for her daughter. Her last letter was written just before her execution on 2 November 1937 and passed to one of her executioners, who sent it on illegally. ‘Papa, Mama, I am going to die. Save my daughter,’ Nina wrote. She told Elizaveta that she could always find her by the Great Bear in the night sky. ‘When you see that, think of me,’ she wrote, ‘because I will be up there.’ Nina’s letters and all her photographs were destroyed after the arrest of her brother in Tbilisi in December 1937.*

  But the memory of that final letter, which her grandmother read to her a dozen times, remained close to Elizaveta’s heart: ‘I was always waiting, always waiting for my mother,’ she recalls. ‘Even as an adult, when I went out at night, I would always look for the Great Bear and think about my mother. Until 1958 [when she found out that her mother had been shot] I saw it as a sign that one day she would return.’

  Elizaveta Delibash, 1949

  The arrest of her uncle made it dangerous for Elizaveta to remain in Tbilisi, as mass arrests swept through the Georgian capital. Although she was nearly ten, Elizaveta had not been to school, but none in Tbilisi would accept the daughter of an ‘enemy of the people’. In January 1938, her grandparents put her on a train for Leningrad, where she lived with her mother’s sister Sonia. A trade-union official at the Kirov Factory, a senior Party activist and an ardent Stalinist, Sonia was the only one of all her aunts and uncles not to be arrested in the Great Terror. Looking back on these traumatic years, Elizaveta thinks she did not really feel or understand the impact of the Terror on her life. Her relatives had not told her very much. By the time she was ten, she had already lived through such extraordinary things – growing up in exile and in labour camps, losing both her parents, finding salvation in a dozen different homes – that she had little sense of where ‘normal’ ended and ‘abnormal’ began. What she felt, she now recalls, was a rather vague and general feeling of disorientation and despondency rooted in the sense that she was ‘unwanted and unloved’. This sense was exacerbated by the atmosphere in her aunt’s apartment which, by comparison with the friendly cheer of her grandparents’ house, was cold, severe and tense after the arrest of Sonia’s husband in January 1938. Expelled from the Party shortly afterwards, Sonia kept a bag packed with some clothes and a few bits of dried bread in readiness for her own arrest, which she expected every night. Elizaveta became increasingly withdrawn. She developed a ‘fear of people’, she recalls. ‘I was afraid of everyone.’ She recounts an incident when her aunt had sent her out to buy some things from the local store. The shop assistant had mistakenly given her an extra 5 kopeks in change. When she returned home, her aunt told her to return the money to the shop and apologize. Elizaveta was terrified, not because of any shame that might have been attached to taking the extra change, but because she was afraid to approach the shop assistant (a stranger) and speak to her in a personal way.

  Despite the arrest of her husband, the repression of virtually all her other relatives, and her own expulsion from the Party, Sonia remained a firm supporter of Stalin. She taught her niece to believe everything in the Soviet press and to accept the possibility that her parents had been guilty of some crime. She told her that her father had belonged to an opposition group and had therefore been arrested as an ‘enemy of the people’, although she also said that Nina had probably been innocent. ‘Sonia rarely mentioned my parents,’ recalls Elizaveta. ‘I was afraid to ask her about them in case she said something disapproving about them. I understood that conversations on this theme were forbidden.’ Perhaps Sonia thought her niece would be held back or become alienated from the Soviet system if she thought too much about her family’s fate. Encouraged by her aunt, Elizaveta enrolled in the Pioneers and then the Komsomol. On each occasion she disguised the truth about her parents, as Sonia had advised her, by claiming that they had been arrested in 1935 (before the general purge of ‘enemies of the people’). Elizaveta recalls entering the Komsomol:

  I was overwhelmed with fear – it went back to the arrest of my parents when I was left all alone – fear of the outside world, fear of everything and everyone. I was afraid to make contact with anyone in case they asked about my family. Nothing was more frightening than a meeting of the Komsomol, where questions about origins were always asked.

  Gradually she overcame her fears. Having been accepted by the Komsomol, Elizaveta gained confidence. ‘For the first time in my life, I no longer felt like a black sheep,’ she recalls. She excelled in her studies, which gave her genuine authority among her schoolmates. She became an activist – the elected secretary of her Komsomol at school and then the secretary of the Komsomol in the district where she lived in Leningrad. Looking back, Elizaveta thinks that her activism saved her, granting her some measure of control:

  When I joined the Komsomol and became one of ‘us’, when I mixed with my contemporaries and became their leader, I was no longer so afraid. I could go and fight their cause, negotiate for them with the authorities. Of course, I was also fighting for myself, because, by appearing strong, I could keep my own fear in check.39

  For ‘kulak’ children, who grew up in ‘special settlements’ and other places of exile, embracing the Soviet cause was the only way to overcome the stigma of their birth. By the late 1930s, many of the children exiled with their ‘kulak’ parents had reached the age of adulthood. The NKVD was inundated with petitions from these teenagers asking to be released from exile and rehabilitated into Soviet society. Some wrote official statements renouncing their families. During the early 1930s, only a very few appeals were successful: some ‘kulak’ daughters were allowed to leave their places of exile to marry men with the full rights of a Soviet citizen, but otherwise the view of the government was that the return of ‘kulak’ children would contaminate and demoralize society. However, from the end of 1938 there was a change of policy, with a new emphasis on the reforging and rehabilitation of ‘kulak’ children. At the age of sixteen they were now allowed to leave their places of exile and regain their civil rights – provided they renounced their family.40

  Dmitry Streletsky was one such ‘kulak’ child. Born in 1917, in the Kurgan region, he was exiled with his family to a ‘special settlement’ near Chermoz in the northern Urals during collectivization. Growing up in the settlement, Dmitry felt the stigma of his ‘kulak’ origins acutely. ‘I felt like an outcast,’ he recalls. ‘I felt that I was not a complete human being, that I was somehow blemished and made bad because my father was exiled… I did not feel guilty, like an enemy, but I did feel second-rate.’ Education was his way out: ‘“Study, study, children!”, Father always said. “Education is the one good thing that Soviet power can give you.”’ And Dmitry studied. He was the first boy from the settlement to complete the tenth class at the school and was rewarded for his industry by being admitted to the Komsomol in 1937. ‘Proud and happy’ to be recognized at last as an equal, he soon became an activist. Dmitry identified his own progress with the ideals of the Party. He saw the Party as a higher form of community, a ‘comradeship of fair-minded, first-rate people’, in which he could find his salvation. On his father’s advice, Dmitry paid a visit to the NKVD commandant of the ‘special settlement’ and asked for help to continue his studies at a university. Commandant Nevolin was a decent type. He felt sorry for the bright young man, whose success at school was already known to him, and he clearly saw him as someone worth helping. Nevolin gave Dmitry a passport and 100 roubles, more than twice the monthly wage in the ‘special settlement’, and sent him to Perm with a letter of recommendation from the NKVD, which enabled him to enrol as a physics student at the un
iversity.

  Dmitry never tried to hide his ‘kulak’ origins. He declared them in the questionnaire he filled out on entering the university and as a result he was bullied by the other students. He finally left, thinking that the farther he ran the more likely he was to find a place where he could study without being held back by his past. First he enrolled at the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute; then he moved even further east to Omsk, where he became a student at the Agricultural Institute. But here too his origins came back to haunt him. Six weeks into the first term, Dmitry was called in by the dean and told he had to leave the institute: they had received orders to expel the children of ‘kulaks’, priests and other ‘alien social elements’. Despondently, he resolved to return to the Kurgan region, where he still had some relatives. Other than returning to the ‘special settlement’, he had nowhere else to go. Dmitry went to see his old teacher in the village school where he had studied as a boy, before being sent into exile. The teacher remembered him and invited him to work as a physics tutor in the school. Dmitry had no degree from a higher institute, but in truth the only qualification he really required was a sound knowledge of Stalin’s history of the Party, the Short Course, and that was Dmitry’s favourite book. He taught in the school for a year. In the summer of 1939, he went to visit his parents in Chermoz, who had written to tell him that conditions had improved in the ‘special settlement’. In fact, when he arrived, the new commandant of the settlement, a less forgiving type than Nevolin, arrested him, confiscated his passport and threatened to send him to a labour camp. Once again, Dmitry was saved by his outstanding record as a student. The director of the Chermoz school, who recalled his star pupil, appealed to the NKVD, claiming that he desperately needed teaching staff. And so Dmitry was allowed to stay. He taught at the settlement’s school for the next two years, until the outbreak of the war, when he was conscripted by the Labour Army and sent to a lumber camp (‘kulak’ sons were banned from front-line service in the army until April 1942).