The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  We could not go to the theatre, we were too ashamed. All I had to wear was a three-rouble pair of lace-up canvas sandals, which I wore throughout the year, and the cotton dress which my mother had made for me in 1946. We did not have the money to buy me a coat until 1957. It was a black woollen coat, very poorly made, which we purchased second-hand.5

  In September 1945, a commission of the Central Committee was appointed to look into a series of large-scale strikes and demonstrations in the defence plants of the Urals and Siberia – just one of many workers’ protest movements at that time. The commission concluded that the main reason for the strikes was the chronic shortage of housing and consumer goods which affronted the workers’ dignity. Reporting on the strike by the 12,000 workers of Factory No. 174 in Omsk, the commission reported:

  The workers and their families are in desperate need of clothes, shoes and linen. In 1945, the average worker received 0.38 items of clothing and 0.7 pairs of shoes. Because of the shortage of shoes and clothing, 450 children did not go to school in 1944, and this year there are about 1,300 children in this situation. Many workers have become so ragged that they cannot show themselves in public places. The workers’ families have no cutlery or kitchen utensils, spoons, cups, bowls; they do not have enough beds, stools, washbasins and other essential items. There are long delays in the distribution of rations, which are mostly surrogates. The workers receive barely any soap, salt or kerosene.6

  Emboldened by their wartime experience, people were no longer frightened to express their discontent. In 1945–6, alone, the NKVD of the Russian Republic received well over half a million letters from Soviet citizens, who wanted to complain about the situation in the country as a whole. One factory worker even gave his own name and address in his angry letter:

  So this is what we have come to! This is what you call the state’s concern for the material needs of the working people in the Fourth Stalinist Five Year Plan! Now we understand why there are no meetings to discuss these concerns – they might turn into revolts and uprisings. The workers will all say: ‘What did we fight for?’7

  At the end of the war people had been convinced that life in the Soviet Union would improve. According to the writer Ilia Ehrenburg:

  Everybody expected that once victory had been won, people would know real happiness. We realized, of course, that the country had been devastated, impoverished, that we would have to work hard, and we did not have fantasies about mountains of gold. But we believed that victory would bring justice, that human dignity would triumph.

  The expectation of reform, the greater sense of independence, and the vision of a better life fostered by the encounter with Europe and with Western books and films all came together to create the stirrings of a new political community. People had been altered by the war; they lost some of their old fear and felt freer to talk. In veterans’ clubs and student meeting-places, in cafés and beer halls, people allowed themselves the kind of liberty they had first experienced in the war. Everybody spoke about the need to improve the standard of living. Even in the highest circles change was acknowledged as a political necessity. ‘Absolutely everyone says openly how they are discontented with life,’ one senior general told another in a private telephone conversation, which was taped by the NKVD in 1946. ‘It’s what everyone is saying everywhere.’ The Politburo member Anastas Mikoian believed, as he recalls in his memoirs, that with the ending of the war the country would return to something like the NEP of the 1920s.8

  Anti-Stalinist opinions were seldom expressed openly, but they were a tacit element in the unofficial discourse uniting certain social, ethnic and occupational groups, prisoners and exiles, and sometimes even whole cities with reason to be hostile to the regime. In Leningrad the wartime experience of the siege fostered in the city’s population a strong anti-Moscow feeling, which was widely understood by Leningraders as a sign of their own civic independence and even opposition to the Kremlin. This dissent was subtly articulated in the folklore of the siege, in public monuments to its victims, in the city’s jargon, jokes and anecdotes.

  Marianna Gordon was seventeen when she returned to Leningrad in 1945 from evacuation in Cheliabinsk. Her father had remained in Leningrad throughout the siege. He was a translator for Soviet trade delegations, an active theosophist, who had been imprisoned several times during the 1920s and 1930s. On her return, Marianna noticed that her father had become more open in voicing his dislike of the Stalinist regime. She recalls an incident in 1945 when her father made a comment which, even in the privacy of their home, he would never have allowed himself to make before the war:

  The radio was on, my father was lying on the bed reading, and I was washing the floor. The singer [Iurii] Levitan came on the radio and sang the song that was then everywhere, ‘Glory to Comrade Stalin! Our Great Leader!’ Papa said: ‘Marianna, strangle that kleine Sachs!’* He was just asking me to switch off the radio, but I was completely taken aback. Until then I had more or less accepted the idea that comrade Stalin was the author of our victory, and although I had my doubts, I had always suppressed them. Papa’s words made me think more sceptically.9

  Scepticism and dissent were particularly developed in the post-war student community, where open expressions of opposition were more common. The generation of students that had grown up during the war proved to be more independent in their thinking than the children who had come of age before 1941. Many of these young people had been exposed to the world of adults in the war, a time when criticisms of the regime were often heard. Their experience bred a special kind of independence and distance from Soviet propaganda and the conformist culture of the Komsomol, although most of them continued to believe in the Communist ideal. Valentina Aleksandrova, the daughter of a Bolshevik official arrested in 1938, describes this clash of values among her fellow students at the Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad, where she enrolled in 1947:

  We were definitely patriotic in the spirit of those times: our Motherland was great, we had won the war; we thought of ourselves as the Young Guard and even formed a club by that name.* But we also reacted against what we saw as the corruption of society – the girl who studies badly but gets good grades because she’s the daughter of a model worker or an engineer, and so on. There were many things like that which we disliked: the compulsory lectures on the history of the Party; the teacher who made us write the number of our Komsomol membership on the cover of our exercise books; the lack of sincerity we sensed in the propaganda efforts to make us respond a certain way. To us, the Komsomol seemed a place for careerists, and we stayed away from it, forming our own circle at the institute, where we would meet to drink and discuss political ideas. If anyone had overheard our conversations, we would have been arrested, but our dangerous talk just united us more firmly. In our circle to be in opposition to the cult of Stalin was a mark of belonging. After a few drinks somebody might become very daring and sarcastically propose a toast: ‘To comrade Stalin!’ And we would all laugh.10

  There were many such informal student groups. Most were small discussion circles where independent thinking was encouraged, along with the reading of a wider range of books than officially approved. But there were also more-political groups, usually watched by the NKVD, which espoused some form of Communist regeneration in reaction to what they saw as the domination of the Komsomol by ‘careerist elements’. Although these groups were small, rarely numbering more than a handful of students, the views they expressed were shared by many young people. In Cheliabinsk, for example, the NKVD uncovered a student circle which published its own almanac with mystical poetry and political articles calling for the restoration of the Leninist revolutionary spirit in the Komsomol. A report by a local Party commission in September 1946 found that many of these attitudes were broadly shared by the students of Cheliabinsk, who were just as alienated by the Komsomol, because it failed to address their interests in foreign literature, sexual matters and philosophy.11

  In 1945, Elena Shuvalova returned with her
mother from evacuation to Leningrad and began her studies at the university. During the 1930s, the family had been exiled to Voronezh, as punishment for her father’s correspondence with his mother in Germany. Elena’s parents were divorced in 1939. The stigma of growing up in exile had left its mark on Elena, who became ‘withdrawn’ and ‘inwardly resistant’ to the Soviet system, in her own words. This internal resistance was reinforced by her mother, an artist who specialized in portraits of Stalin, whom she sardonically referred to as ‘the father of the nation’ when they were alone at home. Brought up by her mother ‘to believe in God and always speak the truth’, Elena felt increasingly estranged from the social milieu of the university, where she had to hide the truth about her past. Openness and plain speaking became synonymous for her with the assertion of her personality. She started up a discussion circle with her two most trusted friends, Natasha and Elena, who also had spoilt biographies. ‘The idea was to be entirely open with each other,’ she recalls. ‘We held our first session (zasedanie) in Elena’s room in the communal apartment. We discussed how to attract new members. We needed “our” sort of people – non-conformist types.’ The circle never developed, because Elena explained what she was doing to her grandfather, a former tsarist official, who took fright and made her stop. He revealed a family secret to discourage her from her activities: Elena’s parents had been punished in the 1930s, not just for their German connections but also for their involvement in a clandestine religious organization.12

  Liudmila Eliashova enrolled as a student at Leningrad University in 1940, two years after the arrest and execution of her father, a veteran Bolshevik and well-known Leningrad neurologist. Evacuated with the university to Saratov in 1941, she returned with it to Leningrad in 1944 and graduated in 1946. By this time she had already formed dissenting views on the Stalinist regime. A major influence on her thinking was the rector of the university, the brilliant political economist Aleksandr Voznesensky, who rescued many children of the ‘enemies of the people’ by getting them admitted to the university. Morally courageous and humane, charismatic and handsome, Voznesensky was ‘my ideal Soviet man’, recalls Liudmila. ‘I even wrote to him to tell him so. To some extent he took the place of my father, who had been my ideal man.’ Voznesensky’s lectures introduced Liudmila to Marx, whose early works, in particular, became her gospel and the basis of her moral opposition to the Stalinist regime. ‘Marx was a great humanist,’ reflects Liudmila.

  After I had listened to Voznesensky’s lectures and read Marx’s works, I began to understand that true socialism, the Communist idea, was not at all what we had under Stalin. Our task was to return to the true socialist society, in which people like my father would never have been arrested.

  Instead of a picture of Stalin, Liudmila kept a portrait of Marx among her things. Every day she would cross herself before it and say, as if in prayer: ‘Karl Marx, teach me how to live!’ Together with some friends from the university, she formed a Marxist study group, which met once a week in the Public Library. As in the underground revolutionary circles of the nineteenth century, friendships in the study group were made and broken on the basis of political principles. Liudmila remembers a typical incident:

  One day in the Public Library, a few of us were standing on the staircase, talking. Somebody said: ‘Why has there been such a long delay in the convocation of the Nineteenth Party Congress? Surely it is an infringement of the Party rules!’ Since the Eighteenth Party Congress [in 1939] well over five years had gone by [the Nineteenth Congress was not convened until 1952] and this seemed to us to be against the principles of Party democracy [which had called for a Congress every year between 1917 and 1925 and would guarantee one every five years between 1956 and 1986]. Then this girl said: ‘Stalin must know best!’ I looked at her and thought: ‘That’s it!’ For me she ceased to exist as a human being.*

  The group began to read beyond the literature they were offered in classes. Not unlike the later dissidents, they were trying to discern a ‘moral code’, as Liudmila puts it, ‘by which we might live more honestly, without dissimulation, in a society whose basic principles negated any moral code’.

  From Marx we learned about Dante, whose motto he quotes: ‘Follow your own path and let the others talk.’ We often discussed this and came to the conclusion that, though it is impossible to ignore the opinions of others completely, one should generally try to follow one’s own path, without compromising one’s principles or conforming to the crowd.13

  Stalin was quick to rule out any idea of political reform. In his first major speech of the post-war era, on 9 February 1946, he made it clear that there would be no relaxation of the Soviet system. Speaking against the backdrop of mounting Cold War tensions, Stalin called for renewed discipline and sacrifices on the part of the Soviet people to recover from the damage of the war and prepare for the next global conflict, which the capitalist system was bound to bring about (‘as long as capitalism exists there will be wars and the Soviet Union must be prepared’). Stalin ordered his subordinates to deliver ‘a strong blow’ against any talk of democracy, even before such talk had become widespread. Censorship was tightened, particularly in regard to memoirs of the war, in which the collective experience tended to prompt ideas of reform.14 The NKVD was strengthened and reorganized as two separate bureaucracies in March 1946: the MVD was henceforth to control domestic security and the Gulag system; while the MGB (the forerunner of the KGB) was placed in charge of counter-intelligence and foreign intelligence, although since the regime’s enemies were ipso facto ‘foreign spies’, the MGB’s mandate spilled over into the surveillance of the domestic scene as well. The post-war years saw no return to the level of the terror of the 1930s, but every year several tens of thousands of people – many of them Jews and other nationalities accused of siding with the West in the Cold War – were arrested and convicted by the courts for ‘counterrevolutionary’ activities.15

  Immediately after the end of the war, Stalin launched a new purge of the army and the Party leadership, where rival power-centres, formed by groups perceived as ‘liberal’ reformers, had emerged as a challenge to his personal authority. Stalin’s first priority was to cut down the top army leaders, who enjoyed enormous popularity as a result of the victory of 1945 and, in the case of Marshal Zhukov, had become the focus of the people’s hopes for reform.* The MGB began to monitor the telephone conversations of senior military commanders. A file was kept on Zhukov, whose grandeur had reached intolerable proportions. As the military administrator of the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany, Zhukov had given a press conference in Berlin, at which he claimed the lion’s share of the credit for the Soviet victory. Denounced by Stalin for his boastfulness, Zhukov was recalled to Moscow, summoned before the Military Council and condemned by Politburo members as a Bonapartist threat to the Soviet state (all but one of the generals at the meeting spoke up in defence of the marshal). On Stalin’s orders, Zhukov was demoted to commander of the Odessa Military District; he was later sent to an obscure posting in the Urals (it could have been much worse, for there were rumours that Zhukov had been plotting a military coup against Stalin). Zhukov’s name vanished from the Soviet press. He was written out of Soviet accounts of the Great Patriotic War, which portrayed Stalin as the sole architect of victory. Other popular military heroes shared a similar fate: Marshal Antonov, the former Chief of Staff, was exiled to the command of the Transcaucasian Military District; the names of Rokossovsky, Konev, Voronov, Vatutin and many others were erased from the public record of the war; and several senior commanders were executed or imprisoned on trumped-up treason charges between 1946 and 1948.16

  Stalin also turned against the Party leadership of Leningrad, a city with a strong sense of independence from Moscow and a vibrant literary culture rooted in the European values of the nineteenth century, which made it a stronghold of the intelligentsia’s reform hopes. Leningrad’s Party leaders were neither liberals nor democrats: they were technocrats who believed in th
e rationalization of the Soviet system. During the war, a number of them had risen to senior positions in Moscow, largely due to the powerful patronage of Andrei Zhdanov, the former Party boss of Leningrad. In the post-war years, Zhdanov was in charge of the Party apparatus and oversaw ideological matters as well as foreign policy. By the time he died of a heart attack in 1948, the Politburo contained a disproportionate number of Leningraders, including two, Nikolai Voznesensky and Aleksei Kuznetsov, who were widely seen as potential successors to Stalin. Like his brother Aleksandr, Rector of Leningrad University, Nikolai Voznesensky was a political economist. He was young, dynamic and good-looking. As the Director of Gosplan, Voznesensky had been the mastermind behind the planning of the Soviet war economy. After 1945, he looked for ways to rationalize the reconstruction of Soviet industry, embracing many ideas from the NEP,* which had done so much to revitalize the country after the destruction of the Civil War. Kuznetsov was the Central Committee secretary in charge of security affairs, but he was better known as a military hero from the siege of Leningrad, which was the main reason for his popularity in Leningrad, as well as a source of constant irritation to Stalin.