The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Because at that time we all felt closer to our government than at any other time in our lives. It was not their country then, but our country. It was not they who wanted this or that to be done, but we who wanted to do it. It was not their war, but our war. It was our country we were defending, our war effort.

  According to Kondratiev, a veteran of the front, even the most humble soldier, who was constantly abused and made to feel insignificant by his commanding officers, became his own general when he went into the attack on the battlefield:

  There nobody can command you. There you’re in control of everything. And in defence too you have to have your wits about you… otherwise the Germans will break through… You feel as if you hold the fate of Russia in your hands, and that everything might turn out differently, but for you. In peacetime in our society, nothing depended on the individual. But in the war it was different: everybody felt their personal involvement in the victory.72

  For the ‘generation of 1941’, which had grown up in the shadow of the cult of Stalin and the Party, this new freedom was a shock to the system. ‘The military catastrophe of 1941–2 forced us for the first time to question Stalin,’ recalls the literary historian Lazar Lazarev, who went to war directly from high school in 1941:

  Before the war we had not questioned anything, we believed all the propaganda about Stalin, and believed in the Party as the embodiment of justice. But what we saw in the first years of the war forced us to reflect on what we had been told. It made us question our beliefs.73

  The atmosphere presaged the change of values in 1956, the opening year of the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, when Julia Neiman wrote the poem ‘1941’:

  Those Moscow days… The avalanche of war…

  Uncounted losses! Setbacks and defeats!

  Yet, comrades of that year, tell the whole truth:

  Bright as a torch it flamed, that shining year!

  Like crumbling plaster, subterfuge flaked off,

  And causes were laid bare, effects revealed;

  And through the blackout and the camouflage

  We saw our comrades’ faces – undisguised.

  The dubious yardsticks that we measured by –

  Forms, questionnaires, long service, rank and age –

  Were cast aside and now we measured true:

  Our yardsticks in that year were valour, faith.

  And we who lived and saw these things still hold

  Fresh in the memory, and sacred still,

  The watches, rooftops, and barrage balloons,

  The explosive chaos that was Moscow then,

  The buildings in their camouflage attire,

  The symphony of air raids and all-clears –

  For then at last seemed real

  Our pride as citizens, pure-shining pride.74

  As citizens claimed new freedoms, the ideological influence of the Party and the cult of Stalin inevitably weakened. Although it nearly doubled in its size during the war years, the Party lost much of its pre-war revolutionary spirit, as the most committed Bolsheviks were killed in the fighting of 1941–2.By 1945, over half the Party’s 6 million members were serving in the armed forces, and two-thirds of them had joined it in the war. This rank and file differed significantly from the Stalinist Party of the 1930s: it was more pragmatic, not so ideological (or even trained in Marxist-Leninist ideology), less inclined to view the world in terms of class and impatient with bureaucracy.75 The new mood was summarized by Pravda when it argued, in June 1944, in sharp contrast to the Party’s pre-war principles, that the ‘personal qualities of every Party member should be judged by his practical contribution to the war effort’ rather than by his class origins or ideological correctness. According to Lazarev, who joined the Party from the ranks, Bolshevik ideology played almost no role in the war, and the pre-war slogans that advanced the cult of Stalin and the Party lost much of their power and significance:

  There is a legend that the soldiers went into attacks shouting, ‘For Stalin!’ But in fact we never mentioned Stalin, and when we went into battle it was ‘For the Motherland!’ that we shouted. The rest of our war cries were obscenities.

  The war gave rise to a whole new repertoire of anti-Stalin rhymes and songs, like this one from 1942:

  Dear Joseph Stalin!

  Now you’ve lost Tallin!

  The food we get is bad!

  You’ll lose Leningrad!76

  For many people the war was a time of liberation from fear of the regime. It was a time, perhaps the only time in their entire lives, when they were forced to act without regard for the political consequences of their actions. The ‘real horrors’ of the war focused all their attention, while the potential terrors that awaited them at the hands of the NKVD somehow seemed less threatening, or easier to cope with in the general struggle. During the conversation recorded by Hedrick Smith, the Jewish scientist recalled an incident from the war years:

  I was in Kazan in my room sleeping… and in the middle of the night someone from the Cheka came and woke me up, and I was not afraid. Think of it! He knocked on my door in the middle of the night and woke me up and I was not afraid. If some Chekist had done that in the thirties, I would have been terrified. If it had happened after the war, just before Stalin died, it would have been just as frightening… But then, during the war, I was absolutely unafraid. It was a unique time in our history.77

  To an important extent, the new sense of freedom was a product of the regime’s relaxation of political and even religious controls after 1941. Children born to ‘enemies of the people’ especially benefited. If they were willing or qualified to work in areas that met an urgent wartime need, their spoilt biographies were much less of an obstacle than they had been before the war. Though not official policy, it was common practice for pragmatic officials to turn a blind eye to the social background of applicants for jobs and student courses that needed to be filled.

  Yevgeniia Shtern was born in 1927 to a family of Bolshevik officials in Moscow. Her father was arrested and shot two years later as a ‘German spy’. Her mother was sentenced to five years in the labour camps of Kolyma. Yevgeniia was sent to live with her grandmother in the Altai region of Siberia. In 1943, she returned to Moscow and lived with her aunt. The teachers at her school, where she was allowed to study as an external student, recognized her capabilities and protected her. One day in the summer of 1944, Yevgeniia was passing by the university when she saw a notice inviting high-school students to apply to the Physics Faculty of Moscow University. She had never liked physics, she was not good at it, but she recognized the opportunity to enter Moscow University, the most prestigious university in the Soviet Union. Encouraged by her aunt, she decided to try. ‘I was just sixteen,’ recalls Yevgeniia.

  In the questionnaire [which she was obliged to fill out as part of the application process] I did not mention that my parents had been arrested. I wrote that my father had been killed… I think that they would have taken me in any case, because there were not enough people wanting to study physics, and at that time, in 1944, there was an urgent need for physicists.78

  The war years offered similar opportunities to Antonina Golovina, the ‘kulak’ daughter who learned to conceal her social origins. Antonina’s ambition had been to study at the Institute of Medicine in Leningrad. She applied in 1941, but while her high-school grades were certainly good enough for her to be accepted at the institute, she was refused admission probably, as she believes, on the grounds of her suspicious social origins. The outbreak of the war ended her dreams of Leningrad, which came under siege. Antonina worked as an assistant teacher in the village school at Pestovo and then in 1943 applied to Sverdlovsk University. An old school friend, who was a student there, had suggested that she might get in because Sverdlovsk needed doctors and the university had relaxed the rules of admission to the Faculty of Medicine. Despite her ‘kulak’ origins, Antonina was admitted to the university. She soon emerged as one of the best students in the faculty. She had the full support of her
professors, who kept the secret of her social origins. ‘For the first time in my life I was allowed to progress on my own merits,’ she reflects. After the siege of Leningrad was lifted, in January 1944, Antonina applied to the Leningrad Institute of Pediatrics to continue with her studies. She did not have a passport to live in Leningrad, and her ‘kulak’ origins would normally have disqualified her, despite the warm letters of support from her teachers at Sverdlovsk. But Leningrad desperately needed pediatricians to care for the tens of thousands of sick and disturbed children orphaned by the siege. In the words of the official who recommended Antonina’s admission to the institute, it would have been ‘a sin to reject such a student at this time’. Without a passport to live in Leningrad, Antonina could not be officially registered as a student at the institute, so she became one of fourteen ‘illegals’ (all from ‘alien class backgrounds’) studying ex officio, all housed together in a basement room. As an ex officio student Antonina could not get a stipend. She could not take out library books, or eat in the student cafeteria. She worked illegally as a waitress in the evenings to support herself. In 1945, the fourteen students were at last put on a legal footing, provided with passports and registered at the institute. The director of the institute, a pragmatic Communist, had appealed on their behalf to the Leningrad Party Committee, insisting that the students were urgently required for the city’s needs. For Antonina this official recognition was a major boost to her confidence. It partially released her from the fear that she had felt so acutely before the war, enabling her to think more critically about the nature of the Soviet regime and its consequences for her family.79

  The regime’s concessions in the religious sphere also had wide-ranging effects. The relaxation of controls on the Church led to a dramatic revival of religious life from 1943 to 1948 (when most of the concessions were reversed). Hundreds of churches reopened, attendances increased, and there was a revival of religious weddings, baptisms and funerals.

  Ivan Bragin’s family had strong connections to the Church. He counted several priests among his relatives, and his wife, Larisa, was the daughter of a priest. Those connections were rigorously concealed in the 1930s, when the family was dispossessed as ‘kulaks’ and sent into exile in Krasnokamsk: Ivan and Larisa did not go to church; they did not wear crosses; they hid their icons in a chest and hung a portrait of Stalin above the doorway where the icons were traditionally displayed. They encouraged their children to join the Pioneers and participate in anti-religious activities in order to avert suspicion. But after 1944 the family began to return to religious ways. The children were all baptized in a nearby village church, which had been reopened in 1944 after the villagers collected money for a tank. Larisa brought out her most precious icon from the chest and fixed it in a corner of the room, where it was half-hidden only by a curtain. She crossed herself before the icon when she entered or left the room. ‘Gradually,’ recalls her daughter Vera,

  we began to celebrate religious holidays, and Mama told us about them. She would prepare a special dish, although that was difficult during the war. She always said: ‘We have food on the table, so it is Shrovetide. And if there is none, then it is Lent.’ We celebrated Christmas, Epiphany, the Annunciation, Easter, Trinity.80

  Perhaps the most striking aspect of the war years was a new freedom of expression. People spoke openly about the loss of relatives, they related feelings and opinions in a way that would previously have been unthinkable and they engaged in political debates. The war’s uncertainties, including the uncertain survival of Soviet power, had removed the fear of talking about politics and even criticizing the regime.

  Vera Pirozhkova recalls returning to her home town of Pskov in 1942: ‘Everyone was talking openly about politics and without any fear.’ She records an argument between two sisters: one aged twenty-two, the wife of a Red Army officer at the front, the other, seventeen, who was an ‘ardent anti-Communist’. When the elder sister denied any knowledge of the labour camps, the younger one was scornful: ‘You didn’t know?’ she said. ‘The whole country knew about the camps, and you didn’t? You didn’t want to know, you hid behind the back of your officer and pretended to yourself that everything was fine.’ On another occasion, the younger woman criticized her older sister for claiming not to know about the problem of unemployment, even though a number of their relatives had not been able to find jobs before the war. ‘How could you not know? Unless after your marriage you completely forgot about your family and did not care how poor we were.’ Before the war, comments Vera, when the older sister’s husband had been living with the rest of the family, no one would have dared to speak so freely, if only from the fear that he might report them.81

  Food queues were a particularly fertile breeding ground for political discussion and complaint. Anger and frustration united people there and gave them courage to speak out (which is also why the queues were frequented by informers and police). ‘Anti-Soviet views are openly expressed when supplies run out,’ reported one group of informers from various lines outside Moscow shops in April 1942. An old man in a queue for kerosene was heard to say: ‘The Party-parasites are everywhere. The bastards! They have everything, while we workers have nothing but our necks from which to hang.’ To which a woman added: ‘And that’s why we are in a mess.’ In another Moscow queue the following conversation was reported by informers:

  DRONIN [a soldier]: It would be better if we were living now as we lived before 1929. As soon as they introduced the kolkhoz policy everything went wrong. I ask myself – what are we fighting for? What is there to defend?

  SIZOV [a soldier]: It is only now that I have understood that we are slaves. There were people like [the Bolshevik leader] Rykov who tried to do something good for us, but they got rid of him. Will there ever be another person who thinks of us?

  KARELIN [a carpenter]: They told us that the Germans were all ragged and louse-ridden, but when they arrived in our village near Mozhaisk, we saw how they were eating meat and drinking coffee every day…

  SIZOV: We are all hungry, but the Communists say that everything is fine.82

  Tongues were loosened to a remarkable degree. Roza Novoseltseva recalls an encounter with a Moscow shoemaker in 1942. She had just returned to the capital, five years after the arrest of her parents. She had never really questioned the Soviet regime about their arrests. Although she believed in her parents’ innocence, she was prepared to accept that ‘enemies of the people’ actually existed, ‘alien elements that needed to be cleared away’, as she herself described them in 1938. But her visit to the shoemaker changed her view. While he fixed her shoes, he cursed the Soviet government, blaming it for all the country’s woes and telling her the story of his own unjust arrest during the 1930s. He clearly did not think about the dangers of talking in this way to a complete stranger like Roza. The frankness with which he spoke – something she had never before encountered – made her ‘stop and think about these things’ for the first time in her life.83

  The army’s ranks were also an important arena for criticismand debate. The small groups of trusted comrades formed by the soldiers at the front produced a safe environment for talk. ‘We cursed the leadership,’ recalls one veteran. ‘Why were there no planes? Why were there not enough artillery rounds? What was the reason for all the chaos?’ Another veteran recalls that soldiers had no fear of repression for speaking their minds: ‘They thought little about it… Soldiers living with the risk of death were not afraid of anything.’ In the spring of 1945, Lazar Lazarev returned from the front to spend some time in a Kuibyshev hospital:

  Like all soldiers, I had a loose tongue in 1945. I said exactly what I thought. And I spoke about the things in the army that I thought were a scandal. The doctor in the hospital warned me to ‘watch my tongue’, and I was surprised, because I thought, like the rest of the soldiers, that I had a right to speak, having fought for the Soviet state… I often heard the soldiers from villages complain about the collective farms, and how it was necessar
y to sweep them all away when the war was won. Freedom of speech was at such a level that it was thought entirely normal to air views like these.84

  From this kind of talk the outline of a new political community began to emerge. The increased trust and interaction between people gave rise to a renewed civic spirit and sense of nationhood. At the heart of this transformation was a fundamental change of values. Before the war the climate of general mistrust was such that no community was capable of forming on its own, without direction by the Party; all civic duties were performed as orders from the state. But in the war civic duties addressed something real, the defence of the country, which brought people together, independent of state control, and created a new set of public attitudes.

  Many people remarked on the change. The writer Prishvin felt, as he noted in his diary in 1941, that ‘people have got kinder since the war began: everybody is united by their fear for the motherland’. He also felt that class divisions had been erased by the national spirit that had arisen in the war. ‘Only now do I begin to understand that “the people” is not something visible, but something deep within us,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘The “people” means much more than peasants and workers, even more than writers like Pushkin, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, it is something within all of us.’ Others experienced this wartime national unity as a new feeling of solidarity in their work place. Ada Levidova noted a new ‘closeness’ among the staff of her medical institute in Leningrad, which cut across the old professional hierarchies:

  The institute became our home. The boundaries between the professors and the ordinary workers disappeared. There was the feeling of a common cause, of a shared responsibility for the institute, for the patients, for our colleagues, which made us very close. This spirit of democracy (for that is what it was), the feeling that we were one family, was sensed by all who survived the siege of Leningrad. It remained with us after the war.