The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  We felt unwanted, handicapped… We were insulted when Stalin compared us to nothing more than the ‘little screws’ in a machine. That is not how we felt at the front. We thought then that we held the destiny of Russia in our hands, and we acted accordingly, in the belief that we were citizens.

  Reflecting on these years, Kondratiev wrote:

  We had beaten the Fascists and liberated Europe, but we did not return feeling like victors, or rather, we felt that way for a very short time, while we still had hopes for change. When those hopes did not come true, the disappointment and the apathy, which we had at first explained to ourselves as physical exhaustion from the war, seized hold of us completely. Did we really understand that, by saving Russia, our Motherland, we had also saved the Stalinist regime? Perhaps not. But even if we had understood it, we would have fought in the same way, preferring our own home-grown totalitarianism to the Hitlerite version, because it is easier to bear violence from one’s own people than from foreigners.97

  Families were harder to reconstitute than the soldiers had imagined in their letters home: sweethearts did not wait for them; women did not match up to the soldiers’ dreams; and marriages collapsed from the strains of separation and return. In his play So It Will Be, written in the summer of 1944, Simonov tells the story of an officer who returns to Moscow from the front. His wife and child have long gone missing in German-occupied territory, and the officer is sure that they are lost, so he starts a new life, marrying the daughter of a professor. The play’s main idea, that people would need to move on when the war ended, could not have been further from the message of ‘Wait For Me’.

  The ending of the war coincided with the first mass release of prisoners from the Gulag. The eight-year sentence received by millions of ‘politicals’ in 1937–8 came to an end in 1945–6 (other prisoners, whose sentences expired before 1945, had to wait until the ending of the war for their release). Families began to piece themselves together again. Women took the lead in this recovery, sometimes travelling across the country in search of husbands and children. There were tight restrictions on where former prisoners could live. Most of them were banned from residing in the major towns. So families who wanted to be together often had to move to remote corners of the Soviet Union. Sometimes the only place they could find to settle was in the Gulag zone.

  Nina Bulat was released from a labour camp in Magadan in 1945. She travelled 16,000 kilometres to retrieve her daughter Inessa from an orphanage in Iaroslavl (where she had ended up following the death of her grandmother) and bring her back to live with her in the camp in Magadan. She had little choice in this matter: she had been released with ‘minus 100’, a legal restriction limiting the movement of many former prisoners and prohibiting them from settling in a hundred listed towns.98

  Maria Ilina’s odyssey was even more arduous. Formerly the director of a large textile factory in Kiev, she was arrested as the wife of an ‘enemy of the people’ in 1937 (her husband was a high-ranking Party official) and sentenced to eight years in the Potma labour camps in Mordovia. She was released in 1945 and set about finding her children. At the time of her arrest, Maria’s two-year-old daughter, Marina, and her two older sons, Vladimir and Feliks, were taken to a distribution centre. Their grandmother, already burdened with several grandchildren after the arrest of her other daughter in 1936, had refused to take in the children. Vladimir, who turned sixteen shortly after his arrival in the distribution centre, was arrested there as an ‘enemy of the people’ and sentenced to five years in a labour camp in Magadan. Feliks was sent to an orphanage in Kiev; Marina to a different orphanage in the nearby town of Bucha and then, in 1939, to another one in Cherkassy, 200 kilometres to the south of the Ukrainian capital. From the Potma camps, Maria had written to officials throughout the Soviet Union to learn where her children had been sent. She found no trace of Vladimir, who died an unrecorded death in Magadan some time before 1942. It took Maria eighteen years to discover anything about Feliks, who had been evacuated with his orphanage to the Terekty region of western Kazakhstan after the outbreak of the war. She finally learned that in 1943, when he was only twelve, Feliks ran away from the orphanage and wandered through the country on his own for several months, ending up in the remote town of Cheremkhovo in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, 2,500 kilometres to the east, where he got a job in a factory.

  She had better luck with Marina. It so happened that one of the doctors in the orphanage at Cherkassy, Antonina Mazina, had a sister who was in the same labour camp as Maria. Through her, Maria received regular reports on her daughter’s health from the workers of the orphanage. Marina had fallen ill with scarlet fever shortly after her arrival at the Bucha orphanage. She was close to death. But when she arrived at Cherkassy, Antonina nursed her back to health. She took Marina home to live with her own daughter (also called Marina) until she was well enough to return to the orphanage. Antonina brought her food, halva and sweets and told her they were sent by her mother. It was not often true – small amounts of money came irregularly from Potma (and there were some food parcels from Marina’s grandmother until the outbreak of the war) – but the doctor understood that the young girl needed hope, she needed to believe in a loving mother, if she was to survive. ‘I had no recollection of my mother,’ recalls Marina.

  I had no real idea what a mother was. But the older children in the orphanage would often speak about their mothers and say how kind they were – they would talk about how happy they had been before the war, about how they were never hungry, because there was always bread and butter, and nice sweet things to eat – so in my mind these sweets, the chocolate and the halva, became symbols of the kind and ideal mother I imagined for myself… These were not just sweets that I had been given by anyone – they were ‘Mama’s sweets’.99

  Antonina Mazina with her daughter Marina and Marina Ilina (left), Chimkent, 1944

  In 1941, the orphanage was evacuated from Cherkassy to Chimkent in southern Kazakhstan. But through the workers at the orphanage, who went on writing to Maria, the family connection was maintained. Marina was still too young to write to her mother by herself (she did not receive any schooling until the age of ten) but the caretakers wrote on her behalf, adding their own standard phrases to present the orphanage in a positive light:

  Chimkent, 1 January 1944

  Greeting res[pected] Maria Markovna!

  I am writing to you from your daughter Marinochka: ‘Mama I remember you. Will you be home soon? I miss you very much. I am living well, they feed us well. I can sing and dance and soon I will go to school. Mama, send me your photograph. Goodbye, I kiss you, your daughter Marinochka.’

  I asked her what else she wanted to say, and she said this was enough. Her health is fine. She is a happy child, loved by all the other children in our collective… We are writing regularly to her grandmother in Kiev. Photographs cost 22 roubles in a private booth… Send the money if you want one…

  Care[taker] Aleksandra Zakharovna Gerasimchuk.100

  The orphanage returned from evacuation in 1945, but it was relocated in the ruined buildings of an estate near Lvov, on the Ukrainian border with Poland, instead of Cherkassy. Antonina disappeared. Marina waited for her mother. ‘I had never seen her picture, I did not know what she looked like, but I felt that I was waiting for my mother, as one might wait for God, a saviour,’ she recalls. Mothers came for other children at the orphanage. ‘I was madly jealous of them all, and dreamed that my turn would come next.’ Marina did not realize that these other children were different from her – their parents were not ‘enemies of the people’ but had simply been separated from their children in the war – but she overheard the ‘whispered conversations’ of the caretakers at the orphanage and registered the phrase ‘an enemy of the people’, which she ‘sensed meant something bad that could not be talked about’. Throughout 1945, Marina wrote to her mother on a regular basis. She was by now in the second class at the school in the orphanage and could write in her own hand. Typically t
he teachers told the children what to write, again including some standard phrases to let their parents know that they were happy at the orphanage. But Marina’s letters managed to communicate a different mood. On 17 August she wrote to her mother:

  Hello Mama, how are you? Mama, write to me, just one letter, so I know you have got mine. I have written to you seven letters but maybe you have not got one of them. Mama, I am well, I am not sick. It is already winter here and very cold but even so we go to school. Mama, come for me or send for me soon, I am sick of being here… The other girls do not hit me but there are sometimes fights. Mama, I suppose that you will come and get me in the spring.

  Marina did not know what it would mean to be with her mother, but she was unhappy in the orphanage. She presumed that, like the other children, she had been separated from her mother because of the war and that with the war’s end her mother would come for her; then she would enjoy the happy life which the other children had told her all about from their memories of living with their families before the war.101

  Marina’s mother was released from the labour camps at the end of 1945. Forbidden to return to Kiev, she stayed with friends in various towns, while she went in search of her children. Through the husband of her niece, a Party activist and historian, she made contact with the poet Pavlo Tychina, a member of the Stalinist elite in the Ukrainian capital (although in private he was critical of the regime), who found out her daughter’s whereabouts. Marina remembers the arrival of her mother in a chauffeur-driven car used by members of the government. A crowd of children had gathered at the entrance to see who had come for the lucky girl:

  ‘Someone’s come for you,’ everyone was telling me… I came out. There was a strange woman there. I did not know what to do. I was afraid of being punished if I ran up to her and embraced her. I knew that the caretakers did not like it when the children flung their arms around someone who had come for them, because it showed the orphanage in a bad light. We had to give the impression that everything was fine, that we were reluctant to leave… But also I was very shy. Mama later said that there was no joy at our meeting, that I looked afraid. I was afraid of everything… I remember thinking that I might not be taken. No one had told me that the woman was my mother. And I didn’t know it was her, because I had never seen her, not even in a photograph. She was no longer young. She was wearing an old shawl on her head which looked as if it had been loaned to her to help her look respectable. She was not dressed like a lady, she had no furs, no hat, no pretty things. She looked poor and unhappy, like an old woman. She did not look like a mother, not as I had pictured her. What was a mother in my mind? Someone beautiful and smartly dressed, young and striking, full of life… But this woman had grey hair.102

  Marina’s mother took her to Lvov, where they stayed in a hotel. They ate soft rolls with cocoa for breakfast, Marina’s first experience of such luxuries, which she would remember all her life. After a few days, they went to Cherkassy, where they lived together in a small room in a hostel. Marina went to school. It was very difficult for the two of them to overcome their estrangement. ‘For the first weeks I did not talk at all with my mother,’ recalls Marina.

  I was a wild child from the orphanage and did not want to speak. And she didn’t try to force me, she was afraid of me herself… Maybe she saw something wild in me and was trying to figure out how to handle it… My mother later said that I was not just very shy but also timid and frightened. I would not go to her when she called and would never call for her. For a long time I would say ‘vy’ [the formal ‘you’] to her, and would not call her ‘Mama’. Something stopped me saying that, a wall inside me. I had to force myself to call her ‘Mama’ – it took a long time.

  Although they lived together for the next twelve years, they never formed a close relationship. They were both too damaged to open up to each other. Marina’s mother died in 1964. She never talked to her daughter about what she had experienced in the labour camps. ‘She was too afraid to tell, and I was too afraid to ask,’ recalls Marina. Whatever she found out about her mother’s life in the labour camps she learned from Maria’s Gulag friends. She did not even know about her lost brothers, until 1955, when Feliks reappeared and Maria learned that Vladimir had died. Falling into deep depression, Maria withdrew into herself and never spoke about the past. ‘We lived together in almost total silence,’ remembers Marina.

  It was terrible. To this day, I do not understand. Why was she so frightened to speak? I think she did not want to burden me. She wanted me to be happy, not to make me bitter about life in the Soviet Union. She knew that everything that had been done to our family had been an injustice, but she did not want me to think that.103

  7

  Ordinary Stalinists

  (1945 – 53)

  1

  The Bushuevs returned to Perm from the ALZhIR labour camp in December 1945. Zinaida and her three children – Nelly, Angelina and their younger brother Slava – moved into a communal apartment on Soviet Street. They shared a room, 11 metres square, with Zinaida’s mother and her brother Tolia and his wife, who had two young children of their own. Zinaida slept with her three children in a single bed; Tolia and his wife in another bed with their baby daughter; and the grandmother slept with Tolia’s other child. ‘It was a nightmare, how we lived,’ recalls Angelina, who was then aged ten. ‘I don’t know how we managed to survive.’ When the Bushuevs came back from the labour camp all their possessions fitted into a single bag. ‘We had nothing,’ recalls Nelly, who was twelve, ‘only our bedding and the clothes we were wearing. My mother used to say: “I wonder if we’ll ever see the day when we each have a bed?”’ The housing block they lived in was totally run down. No repairs had been carried out since the beginning of the war. There was no water or electricity, the roof had fallen in, the sewage system had broken down, and vermin were everywhere.

  Perm was a long way from the fighting, but although it was never bombed, it was, like many cities in the rear, in a terrible condition. The mass influx of evacuees from the war zone had placed enormous pressure on the city’s housing, food and fuel supplies. The main streets had been turned into allotments for growing vegetables. There were no cars in the city, just a few trucks around the factories. Many of the city’s wooden pavements, its benches, fences and most of its trees had disappeared, all chopped up for firewood.1

  No other country suffered more from the Second World War than the Soviet Union.* According to the most reliable estimates, 26 million Soviet citizens lost their lives (two-thirds of them civilians); 18 million soldiers were wounded (though far less were recognized as such by the Soviet authorities);† and 4 million disappeared between 1941 and 1945. The demographic consequences of the war were catastrophic. Three-quarters of the people killed were men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. By the end of the war, there were twice as many women as men in this age range, and in areas of heavy fighting, such as Stalingrad, Voronezh, Kursk and Krasnodar, the ratio was three to one. The imbalance was especially acute in rural areas, because so many peasant soldiers chose not to return to their villages, but settled in the towns, where the demand for factory labour promised jobs. There were villages where no soldiers came back from the war. Soviet agriculture never really recovered from this demographic loss. The kolkhoz became a place for women, children and old men.2

  The Bushuev ‘corner’ room in the communal apartment at 77 Soviet Street, Perm, 1946 – 8

  The material devastation was unparalleled: 70,000 villages, 1,700 towns, 32,000 factories and 40,000 miles of railway track were destroyed. In areas occupied by the Germans half the housing stock was damaged or destroyed. In Moscow, which was not the worst affected, 90 per cent of the city’s buildings had no heating, and 48 per cent no running water or sewage systems, in 1945. In all, 20 million people were left homeless by the war. The Soviet authorities were very slow to respond to the urban housing crisis, which was exacerbated by the massive in-migration of people from the countryside as rural living
standards steadily declined. As late as the 1950s, there were still millions of people living in the ruins of buildings, in basements, sheds or dug-outs in the ground.

  Simonov, who became a Soviet deputy for the Smolensk region in 1947, received hundreds of appeals for help with housing from his constituents. One typical letter came from an officer and Party member who was demobilized in 1946. He was living in Kaluga with his family of six, including three young children and his elderly mother, in a small unheated basement room, where the roof leaked and water ran down the walls. They had been there since 1941, when their house in Smolensk had been bombed. For two years, the officer petitioned for new accommodation, but there was no reply from the Soviet authorities. With Simonov’s assistance the family was finally scheduled for rehousing in Smolensk, but because of bureaucratic delays the move was not completed until 1951.3

  The Soviet economy emerged from the war in a catastrophic state. Two poor harvests, in 1945 and 1946, brought the country to the brink of famine with at least 100 million people suffering malnutrition. Between 1946 and 1948, an actual famine developed, and in the worst-affected areas, such as the Ukraine, some 2 million people died of starvation.4 The production of consumer goods had come to a virtual standstill in the war, when industry was geared towards the army’s needs. Despite the propaganda promises of a return to the good life, the military demands of the Cold War meant that for another decade the main priorities of Soviet industry would remain the production of steel and iron, energy and armaments. Basic household items were in short supply, especially in provincial towns like Perm, where everybody wore patched-up clothes and worn-out shoes.

  Zinaida Bushueva found a job in the offices of a state insurance agency, but her ration was not adequate to feed the family, so she got a job for Nelly as an office messenger, which meant that they received a second ration card. Even so, the Bushuevs only had enough money for bread, soup and potatoes. They could not afford soap, which disappeared entirely from the state shops and could be purchased only in the countryside, where it was made and sold illegally by the peasants. They had only a single pair of shoes for the three children, so they took turns going to school. Zinaida’s salary was not enough to buy clothes for the children, so she made them clothes from rags she bought on the market. The children were embarrassed to go out. Angelina recalls an occasion when they were invited by an aunt to the theatre. It was a few years later, in 1950, when material conditions had improved somewhat and all the children had some clothes and shoes, but they still had feelings of embarrassment: