The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  In 1949, Stalin sent Grigorii Malenkov, the head of the Party Secretariat and a bitter enemy of Voznesensky and Kuznetsov, to inspect the work of the Leningrad Party organization. The pretext of Malenkov’s visit was to investigate allegations of fixed elections by the district Party committees, but his real purpose was to break the city’s power-base. The first target was the Museum of the Defence of Leningrad, whose exposition presented the history of the siege as a collective act of heroism by the city’s people largely independent of the Party’s leadership. The Museum was closed down and its leaders arrested. The Museum’s invaluable depository of personal documents and recollections was destroyed, as if to erase all memory of the city’s independence and bravery. Then, in August 1949, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky were arrested, along with several other independent-minded Leningrad officials, including the rector of the university, in what became known as the ‘Leningrad Affair’. Accused of various trumped-up charges, from spying for Britain to debauchery, Voznesensky and the others were found guilty in a secret trial and shot on the same day in October 1950.

  The post-war political clampdown was matched by a return to the austerity of the planned economy. As Stalin warned in his 9 February 1946 speech, there could be no relaxation in a situation of international tension. A new Five Year Plan was introduced that year. Huge building projects were drawn up for the restoration of the country’s infrastructure. The fantastic targets set for industrial production could only be fulfilled by a workforce of Stakhanovites. Soviet propaganda cajoled the population to brace itself for one more period of sacrifice, sweetening its message with the usual promise that hard work would be rewarded with cheap consumer goods. However, for most of the population, there was little reason for faith in such promises. Rising prices on the few available basic household goods were deflating real wages. To deal with the problem of inflation the regime introduced a currency reform in 1947, exchanging old for new money at a rate of ten to one, which drastically reduced the spending power of the rural population, in particular. It wiped out peasant savings from the market sale of garden vegetables and handicrafts during the war, when there had been a relaxation of restrictions against petty trade.17

  Forced labour played an increasingly important part in the post-war Soviet economy, according to a policy dictated by Stalin and his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of advisers. With the ending of the war the pool of unpaid labour available for exploitation by the state grew enormously. Apart from Gulag prisoners and labour army conscripts, there were 2 million German POWs, and about another million from other Axis nationalities, who were mostly used for timber-felling, mining and construction, although those with skills were employed occasionally in Soviet industry. In some factories German POWs were so integral to production that detention camps were built on the factory grounds and officials tried to block the prisoners’ repatriation to Germany. The Gulag population also grew, despite the release of many prisoners in the amnesty of 1945; the camps took in well over a million new prisoners between 1945 and 1950, largely as a result of the mass arrest of ‘nationalists’ (Ukrainians, Poles, Belorussians, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians) in territories captured or reoccupied by the Red Army but never really reconciled to Soviet power. The Gulag system expanded into a vast industrial empire, with 67 camp complexes, 10,000 individual camps and 1,700 colonies, employing a captive labour force of 2.4 million people by 1949 (compared with 1.7 million before the war). Overall, it is estimated that conscript labourers represented between 16 and 18 per cent of the Soviet industrial workforce between 1945 and 1948. They were especially important in the mining of precious metals in cold and remote regions where free labour was very expensive, if not impossible, to employ (hence their contribution to the Soviet economy was even more significant than the figures would suggest). Slave labour also made up the workforce in the big construction projects of the late 1940s which came to symbolize, officially at least, the post-war confidence and achievements of the Soviet system: the Volga–Don Canal; the Kuibyshev hydro-electric station; the Baikal-Amur and Arctic railways; the extensions to the Moscow Metro; and the Moscow University ensemble on the Lenin Hills, one of seven wedding-cake like structures (‘Stalin’s cathedrals’) in the ostentatious ‘Soviet Empire’ style which shot up around the capital in these years.18

  The post-war years saw a gradual merging between the Gulag and civilian economies. Every year about half a million Gulag labourers were contracted out to the civilian sector, mostly in construction, or wherever the civilian ministries complained of labour shortages; about the same number of free labourers, mostly specialists, were paid to work in Gulag industries. The Gulag system was increasingly compelled to resort to material incentives to motivate even its forced labourers. The population of the camps had become more unruly and difficult to control. With the amnesty of about a million prisoners in 1945, mainly criminals, who had their sentences either reduced or annulled, the camps were left with a high proportion of ‘politicals’ – not the intellectual types who filled the camps in the 1930s but strong young men who had fought as soldiers in the war, foreign POWs, Ukrainian and Baltic ‘nationalists’ – who were hostile to the Soviet regime and not afraid of violence. Without a system of rewards, these prisoners simply refused to meet the set targets. The cost of guarding the prisoners was also becoming astronomical. By 1953, the MVD was employing a quarter of a million guards within its camps, spending twice as much on the upkeep of the Gulag than it received in revenue from its output. Several senior MVD officials were seriously questioning the effectiveness of using forced labour at all. There were even mooted plans, supported by Beria and Malenkov, to dismantle sections of the Gulag and convert the prisoners into partially civilian workers, but since Stalin was a firm supporter of the Gulag system, none of these ideas was seriously proposed.19

  The Norilsk complex is a good example of the post-war convergence between the Gulag and civilian economies. Its population tripled, from 100,000 to nearly 300,000 prisoners between 1945 and 1952. Most of the new arrivals were Soviet POWs who had passed through the ‘filtration camps’ (where ‘collaborators with the enemy’ were weeded out by interrogation) on their return from Europe and the former zones of Nazi occupation; or soldiers and civilians who were rounded up as ‘nationalists’ from the Baltic region and Ukraine. But there was also a steady increase in the number of free labourers, who represented about one-third of the total workforce by 1949, if one includes prisoners who remained (or were made to remain) on paid contracts in the Norilsk complex after their release. Finally, there was a large contingent of Komsomol enthusiasts who came to Norilsk as volunteers; and relatives of prisoners who came to be united with their families.20

  Lev Netto was born in 1925 to an Estonian family of Communists that had come to Moscow in 1917. His father was a member of the Latvian Rifle Brigade that played a vital role in Lenin’s seizure of power; his mother, who became an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, named Lev after Trotsky, who was her hero. In 1943, Lev was mobilized by the Red Army and assigned to a special NKVD unit of partisans which was sent to fight behind the German lines in Estonia. Captured by the enemy in 1944, Lev was imprisoned in Dvinsk in Latvia and then sent to a POW camp near Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. In April 1945, the POWs were forced by the Germans to march west. Lev and a few of the other prisoners ran away from the convoy and were liberated by US troops. Lev spent two months in a camp run by the Americans. Despite their attempts to persuade him not to return to his native land, he went back to the Soviet Union in May 1945. He was twenty years old and wanted to study at a university. When Lev reached the Soviet border, he was sent to a filtration camp and then put back into the Red Army. For the next three years Lev served as an ordinary soldier in the newly occupied territories of western Ukraine. In April 1948, he was arrested in Rovno, charged with spying for the USA and, after weeks of torture by his NKVD interrogators, accused of having betrayed his partisan brigade to the Germans during the war. Threatened with the arrest o
f his parents, Lev signed a full confession to his crimes, and was sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour followed by five years of exile in Norilsk.21

  Maria Drozdova was sent to Norilsk after being arrested in Berlin by the Red Army in April 1945. Four years earlier, when she was seventeen, Maria had been captured by the Germans in Krasnoe Selo, near Leningrad, the town she lived in with her parents. She was taken by the German army to Estonia, where she worked as a nurse in a field hospital, and then to Berlin, where she was employed as a servant in the house of a senior Nazi official. Maria resisted several attempts by the Germans to recruit her as a spy – she was beaten by them many times – but her wounds were not enough to persuade the Soviet military tribunal which sentenced her to ten years in Norilsk for ‘treason against the Motherland’.22

  The precious metals of Norilsk played an important role in Stalin’s thinking about the post-war reconstruction of the Soviet economy. To stimulate the Norilsk labour force the camp administration made increasing use of work credits and monetary rewards. By 1952, money wages had become the norm for the majority of Norilsk prisoners, who each earned on average 225 roubles a month, about one-third the normal rate of pay for civilian workers, although in Norilsk food and housing were ‘free of charge’. Many of the voluntary workers received special (‘northern’) rates of pay which were far higher than they could have earned outside the Gulag system.23 A strange hybrid system was evolving in Norilsk: a prison system where the prisoners were paid. But no amount of pay could make up for the loss of dignity and the inhumane conditions in which they were forced to live and work. It was only a matter of time before they rebelled.

  2

  The post-war years witnessed the consolidation of a new type of educated Soviet ‘middle class’. From 1945 to 1950, the number of students in universities and higher schools doubled, giving rise to a young professional class of technicians and managers who would become the leading functionaries and beneficiaries of the Soviet system over the next few decades. This new elite was different from the Soviet cadres of the 1930s: its members were better educated, less ideological in outlook and more stable. Their professional qualifications not only assured them senior positions in the Soviet system, but virtually guaranteed them immunity from demotion on account of class or ideological impurity. Professional capacity began to take the place of proletarian values in the ruling principles of the Soviet elite.

  The creation of this professional class was a conscious policy of the Stalinist regime, which recognized the need for a larger and more reliable stratum of engineers, administrators and managers, both to compete with the capitalist economies and to stabilize the Soviet system by providing it with a more solid social base. The regime needed the support of a loyal middle class, if it was not to be overwhelmed by broader social pressures for political reform after 1945; and the most direct means of winning that loyalty was to cater to people’s bourgeois aspirations. This new Soviet bourgeoisie was rewarded with secure and well-paid jobs, private apartments and the domestic pleasures of a comfortable home. There were few consumer goods to meet their aspirations in the immediate post-war years, but, as in the 1930s, there were plenty of promises of ‘the good life’. Soviet propaganda, films and fiction conjured up an image of the personal and material happiness that lay ahead for those who studied hard and worked diligently. In post-war films and fiction, personal enrichment was promoted as a just reward for industry and loyalty; the pursuit of private happiness, domesticity and material goods was represented as a newly positive (‘Soviet’) value.24

  The expansion of the higher education system was the key to the creation of this middle class. By the early 1950s, there were 1.7 million students in Soviet universities, and well over 2 million students in the higher technical schools and colleges.25 The student population was basically a mix of children from intelligentsia families, a larger share of children from the existing Soviet elite and a sizeable proportion of young men from humble backgrounds who had risen through the ranks of the army in the war and were now given favoured access to higher education. Promoted to the managerial and technical elite, they owed their success, not to their class origins or political zealotry, as did the vydvizhentsy of the 1930s, but rather to their training in Soviet schools and universities. Their identification with the system was closely linked to their professional identity. As engineers and technicians, managers and planners, whose careers were defined by the aim of ensuring that the Soviet system worked effectively, they readily accepted the rationality of the planned economy and society, even if politically, or because of their family’s repression, they had reasons to oppose the Stalinist regime.

  To succeed on this career path people had to conform, at least outwardly, to the demands of the regime. As an engineer explained in 1950,

  To advance on the job, one needs to be energetic and persistent, one must be able to keep one’s mouth shut and to wear a mask… If one can manage to shout, ‘Long Live Stalin!’… and sing the popular song, ‘I know of no other country in which a man breathes so freely’, then one will succeed.

  According to a group of émigrés interviewed at this time, the most common type of Soviet functionary was no longer the Communist believer and enthusiast of the 1930s, but the careerist who might not believe in the Party or its goals but carried out its orders nonetheless.26 Through these ordinary Stalinists, the millions of technocrats and petty functionaries who did its bidding, the regime was routinized, its practices bureaucratized, and the revolutionary impulses that had led to the Terror gradually transformed into the stable culture of a loyal professional elite.

  Dissimulation had always been a necessary survival skill in Soviet Russia, but in the post-war years, when the requirements of class and political commitment became secondary to the outward display of conformity, the art of wearing masks was perfected. Czesłw Miłosz, who had lived under the post-war Communist system in Poland, thought that people had become so practised at acting in public that it began to seem natural:

  After long acquaintance with his role, a man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party slogans. To identify one’s self with the role one is obliged to play brings relief and permits a relaxation of one’s vigilance. Proper reflexes at the proper moment become truly automatic… Acting on a comparable scale has not occurred often in the history of the human race.27

  Few people lost themselves entirely in their public role. A split identity was probably more representative of the Soviet mentality. Like an actor with an eye to his performance, most citizens remained acutely conscious of the difference between their private and their public selves and they had many ways to keep the two identities apart, from strategies to suppress potentially dangerous thoughts and impulses to methods for resolving the moral dilemmas that nagged at their consciences.

  The young professional class of the late 1940s and early 1950s faced new dilemmas compared to those their parents faced in the 1930s. In many cases burdened with a spoilt biography they had inherited from their parents, they were forced to find a way through the system, in which few of them (in contrast to their parents) actually believed – a complex strategic game involving dissimulation (and self-deception), conformism and moral compromise. The first moral choice that many people faced on their career path was whether to declare the arrest of their relatives in the questionnaire (anketa) they were required to fill out on entering a job or university. To reveal a spoilt biography was to run the risk of rejection; but to conceal it could potentially entail even more serious consequences, if the truth was discovered by the authorities.

  Irina Aleksandrova concealed the arrest of her father when she enrolled as a student in the Economics Department at the Polytechnic Institute in Leningrad in 1946. However, in her second year, she revealed the truth in another questionnaire which the students were required to fill out before going on a study trip. Ir
ina thought that ‘times had changed, they had become more free’, and that ‘there was no longer any shame in coming from a family of enemies of the people’, although, looking back on these events, she thinks that she was influenced by the liberal hopes of friends whose families had never been repressed. When it received her second questionnaire, the Komsomol at the institute organized a ‘purge meeting’ of all the students in Irina’s year at which she was made to answer hostile questions about why she had ‘concealed her social origins’. The leaders of the Komsomol accused Irina of behaving ‘shamefully’, in an ‘anti-Soviet manner’, just as her father, an ‘enemy of the people’, had behaved. The meeting passed a resolution to recommend the expulsion of Irina from the institute. Irina was rescued by one of the lecturers, the vice-director of the department, who had himself been arrested during the industrial purges of the early 1930s and had recently returned from fighting at the front. ‘Back then, the moral tone of the institute was still dominated by the soldiers who had returned from the front,’ recalls Irina. ‘They would not tolerate the restoration of the culture of the purge, and they kept a firm grip on the faculties and dormitories to ensure that student activists did not bully others like myself.’ The lecturer made sure that Irina was not expelled – he even got her reinstated to the study trip – and she graduated from the institute with honours. But in 1949 the lecturer was himself dismissed in a general purge of the institute connected with the Leningrad Affair.28

  Many people thought it was ‘the honest thing to do’ to declare the arrest of their parents in the questionnaire. Brought up in the Soviet way, in the belief that private life should be open to public scrutiny, they felt that the most important thing was to live in truth. Others thought that denying their parents’ arrest was tantamount to betraying them for egotistical reasons; conversely to accept the inheritance of their parents’ spoilt biography was in some way to keep faith with them. Inna Gaister enrolled as a student at Moscow University in 1944. She always wrote the truth about the arrest of her parents because she was afraid that if she wrote some half-truth, or a lie, she would be getting dangerously close to renouncing them.