The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  I was very frightened of that… I was afraid that if I lied about my parents, I would be somehow letting go of them… By stating openly that I was the daughter of an enemy of the people, I felt that I protected myself from being put under pressure to renounce my father, which seemed to me a very bad thing to do, even though I knew that he was dead.29

  Inna Gaister (centre) with two friends at Moscow University, 1947

  Some people chose to hide their spoilt biography in order not to jeopardize their career. There were many ways to justify this action in their mind: that their parents were not really ‘enemies of the people’ and that they were therefore not concealing any crime; that their parents would have wanted them to get on in society; or that such concealment was the only way to become honest Soviet citizens. Thus Leonid Makhnach, in his application to the Moscow Film School in 1949, wrote that his father Vladimir (who had been arrested and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labour camp in 1941) had simply ‘vanished without trace’ during the war.30 And Vladimir Vlasov swapped his real name (Zikkel) for the surname of his aunt, Olga Vlasova, who had brought him up in her home in Leningrad after the arrest of his parents. Vladimir found a job in a secret military installation in 1948. He recalls:

  I always wrote the same thing on every questionnaire. My older sister helped me make a crib sheet I could consult so that I was sure to give the same answer every time. I always put down the same false place and date of birth, and always wrote that I had lost my parents at an early age. ‘I have no information about my father,’ I would add. As for my mother, I always gave the [false] name Nina Ippolitovna. I invented the story that she had won three medals in the war, and that she had never been married. I allowed her a lover called Boris Stepanovich, who had come to Russia from Paris, though I was too little to remember much about him, except that he was some sort of artist and did many sketches of my mother. I kept up this fiction until 1980, when I finally killed off my mother. By then, she had reached the age of eighty-six.31

  Only in the Soviet Union, the most bureaucratic and yet absurdly inefficient country in the world, was it possible to keep such lies going for so long.

  For those who wanted to leave their past behind, there was bound to be a change in their relation to parents who had been repressed. As Inna Gaister feared, it was always a temptation to let go of such parents. Angelina Bushueva became an active member of the Komsomol in Perm. She had already joined the Pioneers in the ALZhIR labour camp, from which she had returned with her mother and her sister in 1946. More than anything, she wanted recognition as ‘an equal Soviet citizen’, to enjoy the same rights as other citizens and overcome the stigma of her parentage. At the Pedagogical Institute in Perm, where she enrolled as a student in 1951, Angelina soon became the secretary of the Komsomol. She loved Stalin. She refused to believe that he had been responsible for the arrest of her father, in 1937, or for the destruction of her family, following the arrest of her mother in 1938. Because her mother took a different view – a view that was still dangerous to hold in the early 1950s – the family never talked about the past. Angelina tried not to think about her father. Only by denying him could she move on and pursue a career in a factory in Perm. She certainly never talked about him to her husband, a Communist official in the factory:

  Nelly and Angelina Bushueva, 1953

  In my family we used to say: ‘The more you know – the quicker you grow old!’ Or: ‘The less you know – the easier to live!’ I never talked to anyone about my father – not until I retired from the factory and collected my pension in 1991.32

  Leonid Saltykov was born in 1927 to the family of a priest, who was arrested in 1937. As the eldest of five children, Leonid felt responsible for his mother, a postal worker who did not earn enough to support the family. Although he was a bright boy, he finished only four classes before he was expelled from school, because of his spoilt biography. After several casual jobs, he managed to enrol in a factory school by hiding the arrest of his father. He wanted to become an engineer, to prove himself as a ‘first-class Soviet citizen’, as he recalls, by doing well in a profession highly valued by the regime. In 1944, Leonid got a job as an electrical engineer in a munitions factory in Cheliabinsk. In the evenings he studied at a technical college. On all the forms he wrote that his father had died in 1942: it suggested that he had been killed during the war. ‘Nobody would check up on a date like that,’ reasoned Leonid.

  I stuck to this version of events for many years – right up until 1958, when I became the head of the special sector in the ‘secret group’ of operations in the munitions factory. Then I felt that I should put the record straight… I was afraid that in this ‘secret group’ they would check my story and that, when they found out that I had been lying, they would accuse me of being a spy.

  Leonid in 1944

  Leonid only found out what had happened to his father in 1963 (he had been shot in 1938). Until then, he continued to deny all knowledge about his fate. ‘My only interest was to climb the career ladder,’ he admits, ‘and to do that I had to keep the secret of my past… The truth about my father’s arrest would have blackened my reputation and ruined my career.’ In 1965, Leonid joined the Party. He became the secretary of the Party Committee in the factory where he worked, effectively the leader of 1,500 Communists. He was an ardent Stalinist, grieved when Stalin died and kept his picture on his desk until his retirement in 1993. Leonid did not believe that Stalin was responsible for the arrest of his father (a view he still holds today). On the contrary, he was grateful to Stalin for the opportunity to rise from a humble background, the son of a village priest, and become a senior factory boss.33

  Breaking from the past for career purposes damaged many family relationships. In 1946, Iurii Streletsky graduated with top marks from high school in Tbilisi. He wanted to return to Leningrad, where he had grown up, to study engineering at the Polytechnic Institute, but he was rejected when he admitted on his application that his parents had been arrested as ‘enemies of the people’. Iurii managed to find part-time work in various factories in Leningrad, which enabled him to sit in as an external student on the evening classes at the institute, although he could not take the final examinations or receive certification. In 1948, he was employed unofficially as a technical designer at the main Party press in Leningrad, just when the press was introducing new technology from Germany. Iurii played a vital role in setting up the new machinery, but as an unofficial employee, he received no reward or recognition for his achievement. In fact, as soon as the new printing works was up and running, he was dismissed because of the arrest of his father, which he had recorded in a questionnaire. For the next three years Iurii held a series of casual jobs. In 1951, his mother returned from exile in Kazakhstan to Leningrad. Deeply damaged by her husband’s death and by years of exile, she could not find a job and lived very poorly on her own. Iurii did not visit her, or even try to help her financially. His own bitter experiences had made him selfish, as he confesses in an interview.

  I became an egotist, and my feelings towards others, even towards my own mother, hardened. I put her out of my mind and forgot about her, because I saw her as a burden which I could do without. It is shameful to admit, but it is true.

  In 1953, Iurii applied for a job as a senior technician at the Pulkovo Observatory. This time he did not declare his spoilt biography – he wrote down that his parents were both dead – and as a result he got the job.34

  Some young people were so desperate to make a career for themselves that they became informers for the NKVD. The security organs recruited many of its informers from children of ‘enemies of the people’. They knew that they were vulnerable and that many of them had a strong desire to prove themselves as worthy Soviet citizens.

  Tatiana Elagina was born in Leningrad in 1926 to a family of merchants that had been very wealthy before 1917. The Elagins were exiled to Kazakhstan in 1935 following the murder of Kirov. In 1945, Tatiana applied to study mathematics at Moscow Univers
ity. Although she had top grades, she was rejected on the basis of her ‘alien social origins’. So she enrolled instead at the Moscow Electromechanical Institute for Transport Engineers, where the demand for able students meant that less attention was paid to her family background. Studying in Moscow was the fulfilment of Tatiana’s dreams. But shortly after she began her studies, the institute announced a general purge to remove ‘social undesirables’. Tatiana fled to Leningrad, where she joined the Institute of Electrical Engineering: the authorities there were glad to have a student with such high grades apply and turned a blind eye to her spoilt biography. But in her final year, when the students were involved in ‘secret’ work at power stations, the weeding-out of unreliables was intensified. She was picked to write reports on her classmates:

  They said there was nothing shameful about this, and somehow I managed to convince myself that they were right. They told me that if I heard the students saying something negative about the institute, or complaining about anything, even if it was in a private conversation among themselves, I was to report it immediately, making sure that the people I reported did not know.

  Tatiana did her best to report as little as she could: she passed on rumours she had heard without mentioning specific names. But there was growing pressure on her to provide more-concrete information, not least because, if she refused, she might be sent to work, as others from the year before had been, in the remote regions of the Arctic North by the Ministry of Electric Power, which had first call on the graduates of the institute. Before she took her last exams, Tatiana submitted a report that led to the arrest of three students. She got a prestigious job in Moscow in the Trust of Hydro-electricity.35

  Valentina Kropotina made her whole career by informing. She was born in 1930 into a Belorussian peasant family that was repressed as ‘kulaks’ during the collectivization of agriculture. The family house and farm were destroyed. Valentina’s father was sent into exile, leaving her mother to survive with their two young daughters in a shack she built from the rubble of their house. Banned from school as a ‘kulak’ daughter, Valentina spent her childhood working with her mother in various low-paid jobs, before moving to Irkutsk and then to Abakan, in the Altai region of Siberia. In Abakan she and her mother were reunited with Valentina’s father. Sick and broken from his years in the labour camps, he found a job as the caretaker in a school, where Valentina’s mother worked as a cleaner. Valentina only started attending classes when she was thirteen. Until then she could not read, as she recalls:

  I was basically a street-child, dressed in rags, barefoot… All my childhood memories are dominated by the feeling of hunger… I was afraid of hunger, and even more, of poverty. And I was corrupted by this fear.

  At school Valentina suffered acutely from the stigma of her ‘kulak’ origins. She became increasingly ashamed of her parents’ poverty, of their Belorussian background and their ignorance (they were illiterate and could not speak Russian). Determined to liberate herself by studying hard, Valentina joined the Pioneers and then the Komsomol. Only that path ‘offered hope of an escape from the poverty and hunger in which I had grown up’, she explains. Valentina grew up to believe that Stalin was ‘the greatest human being in the whole of history’. She totally accepted the Party’s propaganda about ‘spies’ and ‘enemies’. She even wanted to become a lawyer so that she could help the government to hunt them down. ‘Like Stalin,’ she recalls, ‘I was not at all sorry for people who were sent to the Gulag.’

  In 1948, when she was eighteen, Valentina ran away from home. She enrolled at a college for accountants and then took a job as a trainee accountant at a naval base on the island of Sakhalin, where she received the higher rates of pay and food rations reserved for special military personnel. Valentina married a naval officer. She became a trusted member of the naval base, where she worked in the staff building, with special access to the files of all the personnel. In this capacity she was recruited by the MVD to inform on the wives of other naval officers. Her task was to strike up friendships with these women and report to her controller on their private lives and opinions:

  In some cases I would approach the women and ask them to make something I could buy: many women spent their spare time sewing and knitting. In others I would befriend the women and get myself invited to their place for tea. Or I would visit them at work. My controller gave me money for these ‘commissions’ (I still have lots of items, mainly coats and pullovers, which my ‘clients’ made for me). He also gave me money to buy a cake for tea, or some other offering so that I could make that first contact and win the women’s trust. The main thing was to make a connection. It was really easy. There was just one rule: you had to be alone with somebody before striking up a conversation about something important. Only then would they speak freely.

  Valentina worked as an informer for several years. She wrote dozens of reports on people who were subsequently arrested. She was well paid – well enough to send large sums of money to her aged parents and to buy a house in Abakan, where she retired with her husband in 1959 (at the age of thirty-nine). During interviews she still insists that she was forced to work against her will. She sees herself as a victim of repression too:

  It was impossible to refuse, they knew everything about my parents and their kulak origins… I knew that they had imprisoned my father and I was afraid that they would imprison me… Besides, my husband might have suffered, if I had refused to cooperate.

  Valentina Kropotina and her husband, Viktor, 1952

  On the other hand, Valentina insists that the people she denounced were truly enemies of the people, ‘proven spies’. She feels no remorse for what she did. Indeed, she is proud of the honours she received for what she calls her work in ‘counter-espionage’.36

  3

  Simonov’s career rose to new heights after 1945. The writer returned from the war with a chestful of medals for his reports from the battlefields. Now a trusted Party member in Stalin’s inner circle of favoured intellectuals, Simonov was put in charge of a small delegation of influential journalists sent by the Kremlin to the USA in May 1946, when the world stood on the brink of the Cold War. Briefed in the Kremlin by Molotov, the Foreign Minister, Simonov was charged by Stalin with persuading the Americans that the Soviet Union did not want a war. The trip gave Simonov his first real taste of governmental privilege. He was shocked by the huge advance that he received for the trip; perhaps he was even unnerved by the disparity between his situation and what he knew of the conditions of ordinary Soviet people, but, if so, the feeling was momentary. Simonov revelled in the pleasures of the West. In the USA Simonov was greeted as an international celebrity. His novel Days and Nights was a national bestseller. Everybody knew his poem ‘Wait For Me’. His plays were running in theatres in New York, Boston, Washington and San Francisco. Simonov himself was photographed in the company of luminaries such as Gary Cooper, Lion Feuchtwanger and Charlie Chaplin, who became his regular correspondent.37

  The American tour was one of several foreign trips made by Simonov in the immediate post-war years. On each occasion he was entrusted by the Soviet government with an important task. In London, which he visited in 1947, Simonov reported on the possibility of recruiting leading writers (including J. B. Priestley and George Bernard Shaw) to the Soviet cause.38 In Paris, where he stopped on his way to America, Simonov attempted to persuade the émigré Russian writer Ivan Bunin to return to the Soviet Union. The only Russian to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bunin had been living abroad since 1920, when he fled the Revolution in disgust. He was now in his mid-seventies, but Stalin hoped that patriotic sentiment and nostalgia might yet convince him to return to his native land. Many émigrés were seduced by the favourable image of the Soviet Union in 1945 and some indeed decided to go back. Simonov met Bunin in Paris in a series of fashionable restaurants. He paid the bills with money given him by the Soviet government. Emphasizing his own noble ancestry, Simonov waxed lyrical about life in the Soviet Union. And whe
n Bunin invited him to dinner in his home, Simonov suggested a ‘collective meal’, for which Valentina Serova was flown in from Moscow with a huge hamper of Russian delicacies (herrings, pork fat, black bread and various types of vodka) designed to heighten the old man’s nostalgia. Valentina even sang him Russian songs. But Bunin did not change his anti-Soviet attitudes. He refused to return to the Soviet Union, even for a visit.39

  In 1946, the Writers’ Union was reorganized on the lines of the Politburo, with a General Secretary, Aleksandr Fadeyev, and three deputies, including Simonov. The writer Kornei Chukovsky noted in his diary on 16 November 1946: ‘The leaders of the Writers’ Union are very stony-faced. Frozen still. The worst is Tikhonov. He can listen for hours without an expression on his face… Fadeyev and Simonov are also very stony-faced. It must be from the habit of chairmanship.’ Two weeks after his election to the leadership of the Writers’ Union, Simonov was made the editor of Novyi mir (‘New World’), the oldest and most prestigious literary journal in the Soviet Union. In March 1950, he left Novyi mir to assume the editorship of the country’s main literary newspaper, Literaturnaia gazeta, with personal instructions from Stalin to use its editorials to articulate an alternative perspective on the cultural politics of the Cold War, one that would appear sufficiently different from the Kremlin’s position to satisfy the literary intelligentsia’s desire for independence without really departing from its hardline policies towards the West. It was a sign of Stalin’s trust in Simonov that he gave him such a delicate and awkward task.40