The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  But for some of the older generation, whose views had been formed in an earlier age, the death of Stalin was just as likely to be a cause for rejoicing.

  Svetlana Sbitneva was born in 1937 in Barnaul in the Altai region of Siberia. Her father was arrested before she was born and was shot in 1938. Her mother came from Omsk, where her family had been active in the Social Democratic movement before 1917. Sixteen of her mother’s relatives were arrested in the Great Terror: all but one, Svetlana’s grandmother, were either shot by the Bolsheviks or perished in the camps. Svetlana was told very little about her family. She grew up to become a model Soviet schoolgirl and, like all schoolgirls, loved Stalin. On the day his death was announced, she came home from school with black ribbons in her hair: there had been a mourning ceremony at her school – the children had decorated Stalin’s portrait with palm leaves and white lilies – and this had left her deeply moved. ‘We were all crying,’ she recalls. ‘We thought that it was the end of the world.’ As soon as she got home, Svetlana climbed up to the roof, where she liked to go to be alone. There she found her grandmother:

  She was sitting there, crying quietly and crossing herself in a way I had never seen before. She saw that I had been crying and she said: ‘Don’t worry, dear, I am crying from happiness. Because he killed my family: my sons, my brothers, my husband, my father – Stalin killed them all – leaving only me and your mother.’ That was the first time I heard any of this. And then the two of us sat down and cried together, from joy and grief.107

  For the vast majority of the Soviet people, whatever Stalin’s death meant, it was not a release from fear. In fact, it was likely to increase their fear: they did not know what would happen next. Nadezhda Mandelshtam recalls a conversation with her dressmaker, one of the few people with whom she shared her feelings, shortly after Stalin’s death:

  ‘What are you howling for?’ I asked her. ‘What did he mean to you?’ She explained that people had somehow learned to live with him, but who knew what would come now? Things might get even worse… She had a point.108

  Boris Drozdov was living with his parents in Magadan after the release of his father, one of Berzin’s close associates, from a labour camp in 1951. ‘Everyone was frightened when Stalin died,’ recalls Boris. ‘My father was afraid. People feared that Beria would come to power, and they were scared of him. The Gulag system was associated with Beria and the MVD, not with Stalin, who many people thought had not even known the truth about the camps.’109

  Vera Bragin’s mother worshipped Stalin, even though she had been exiled as a ‘kulak’ and her husband sent to the labour army, where he died in 1944. ‘When Stalin died, my mother did not throw out his portrait,’ recalls Vera. ‘She kept it on the wall, next to the picture of my father.’ At a village meeting,

  Everyone was crying… People associated Stalin with our victory in the war, with the lowering of prices and the end of rationing. They thought that life was slowly getting better and they were afraid that now it would get worse.

  Many rural people felt a similar anxiety. ‘Things had been so hard for us during the war, but then in the last years [before Stalin’s death] life had got a little better,’ recalls the ‘kulak’ daughter Klavdiia Rublyova, who also spent the war years in the labour army, and then worked in a kolkhoz near Krasnoiarsk. ‘When Stalin died we did not know what would happen, and people were afraid.’110

  Mourning ceremony at the Gorky Tank Factory in Kiev, 6 March 1953

  Fears that Stalin’s death would lead to a new wave of mass arrests agitated many families, especially those who had lost a relative in the Terror. As Elga Torchinskaia remembers:

  The general reaction in our family was, ‘What will happen next?’ We were afraid of the government, we did not know what to expect from it, and we were scared that it might retaliate for Stalin’s death by making more arrests.111

  The fear only abated when the Doctors’ Plot was exposed as a government fabrication. The decision to reveal the truth about the Doctors’ Plot appears to have come from Beria – a critic of the anti-Semitic campaigns and potential victim of the MGB purge that followed from the Plot – who took control of the ‘collective leadership’ that assumed power on 5 March. Despite his background in the security police, which made him widely feared by the population, Beria was something of a political reformer. He wanted to dismantle the Gulag system (‘on the grounds of economic ineffectiveness’), to end the use of torture by the Soviet police, to reverse the Sovietization of the western Ukraine, the Baltic lands and East Germany and to rid the country of the cult of Stalin – a programme which he thought would help build popular support for his own dictatorship. On 4 April, Beria called off the investigation into the Doctors’ Plot. Pravda announced that the people responsible for the ‘incorrect conduct of the investigation’ had been arrested and ‘brought to criminal responsibility’. Public opinion was divided. Judging from a sample of workers’ letters to Pravda, many people continued to believe that there were ‘elusive enemies’ behind the scenes of power and that the rehabilitation of the doctors was itself a sign of ‘Jewish influence’ in the highest spheres of government (‘Without comrade Stalin our government has bowed before the Jews,’ etc.). But others were incensed by what turned out to be malicious slander against Jewish physicians and demanded an explanation for the unjust arrests.112

  For the Torchinsky family the conclusion of the Doctors’ Plot was a huge relief. They took it as emphatic proof that all the ‘plots’ by ‘enemies’ were fabrications by the state and that they need not fear a new wave of arrests. Released from fear, Elga grew in confidence and began to speak out against people who had bullied her. Elga worked as an assistant at the Ethnographic Museum in Leningrad. One of her senior colleagues, an ardent Stalinist and a ‘frightful anti-Semite’ called Maria Nesterova, had given loud support to the ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign, writing dozens of denunciations of Jewish workers at the museum, some of whom were dismissed from their jobs. During the mass hysteria of the Doctors’ Plot, Nesterova became even more vociferous in her denunciations of the Jews, telling everybody, for example, that babies delivered by Jewish doctors were born blue because their blood had been sucked out by the Jews. Elga knew that it was pointless to argue with Nesterova, who obviously hated her. She was afraid to lose her job, so she had remained silent and withdrew into herself. But after the exposure of the Doctors’ Plot, Elga chose to confront her:

  I told her that she did not know what she was talking about, and that everything she said had been picked up from people in food queues… Maria began to threaten me: ‘Do you know what I can do to you? You shut up!’ And then from somewhere, I don’t know where, I found the courage to reply: ‘Please, don’t threaten me, I’m not afraid of you.’113

  Those who felt joy at Stalin’s death were mostly too cautious to show it in public. Any sign of pleasure had to be concealed. Zinaida Belikova, a factory worker in Krasnodar, recalls that many of the town’s intelligentsia, doctors, teachers, even Party officials, found it hard to hide their excitement when Stalin died. ‘The mourning ceremonies in Krasnodar were more like a holiday. They put on a mournful face, but there was a sparkle in their eyes, the hint of a smile beneath their greeting, that made it clear that they were pleased.’114

  When the Gaisters heard the news of Stalin’s death, they were still living in exile in Kazakhstan, expecting to be rearrested any day in connection with the Doctors’ Plot. On 6 March, Inna’s mother Rakhil came home from the shop with a kilogram of sugar. There was never any sugar in the shop, but for some reason, that day the shop had it. No one else in the settlement had dared to buy the sugar. It might be seen as evidence of celebration. But Rakhil saw no harm in taking advantage of her good fortune in finding some. When she showed the sugar to her daughters, they were terrified. ‘We threw ourselves at poor Mama, and became hysterical,’ recalls Inna. ‘How could she have bought sugar on a day like this? What would they think of us? Poor Mama! Fear had deprived us of rea
son.’115

  The one place where the death of Stalin was welcomed with undisguised rejoicing was in the Gulag’s camps and colonies. There were, of course, exceptions, camps where the vigilance of the authorities or the presence of informers prevented prisoners from showing their happiness, but generally the news of Stalin’s end was greeted with spontaneous outbursts of joy. On 6 March, in the Inta camp Iurii Dunsky and Valerii Frid met with their friend, the poet Smeliakov, to organize a midnight party. They could not get hold of any alcohol (everybody wanted some that day) so they bought a bag of sweets and ‘ate them all in one sitting… as if we were children at a tea-party’. In the Viatka labour camp Vera Bronshtein and her fellow prisoners set down their tools and began to sing and dance when they heard the news: ‘We are going home! We are going home!’ Among the prisoners it was commonly assumed that they would be released on Stalin’s death. Hopes and expectations were extremely high. When Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg heard the news, she was living in exile in Karaganda in Kazakhstan. Covering her face so that her workmates could not see her joy, she began to tremble with nervous excitement: ‘It’s now or never. Everything has to change. Now or never.’116

  In several labour camps expectations ran so high that, when the prisoners were not released on Stalin’s death, there were mass protests and uprisings. During the spring and early summer of 1953, major strikes and protests erupted in the labour camps of Norilsk and Vorkuta, followed by smaller demonstrations in many other camps in 1953–4.117 These ‘slave rebellions’ were an important turning-point, not just because they helped to bring about the abolition of the Gulag system, which was already being questioned by the Soviet leadership, but because they were the first real protest on a major scale against the tyranny of the Stalinist regime.

  The Norilsk uprising was the biggest in the history of the Gulag. It involved nearly 20,000 prisoners in six camp zones of the Gorlag prison, the mining and industrial complex of Norilsk, where the work regime was particularly harsh. Most of the Gorlag prisoners were former Red Army soldiers, foreign POWs and Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists, many of them serving sentences of twenty-five years for their part in resistance movements against Soviet forces in 1943–5. They were hostile to the Stalinist regime, ready for a fight and did not have a lot to lose. During the autumn of 1952, a large contingent of prisoners had been transferred to Gorlag after taking part in an armed uprising in the Karaganda camps. The influx of these rebels had a radical effect on the political mood within the Norilsk camp. Ad hoc ‘strike committees’ sprang up in all the Gorlag zones. In the fourth zone, where Lev Netto was a prisoner, there was even a secret reading and discussion club called the ‘Democratic Party’ (also known as the ‘True Leninists’). Here prisoners studied Lenin’s ideas on the revolutionary underground as a model for how to organize themselves along military lines.

  Stalin’s death raised their hopes of a release. But when Beria declared an amnesty on 27 March, it applied to prisoners whose sentences were shorter than five years (mainly criminals). Conditions at Gorlag became even worse. The working day was lengthened, prisoners were forced to work in severe frost, and rations were reduced to a minimum. The guards began to treat the prisoners with calculated cruelty. They provoked the remaining criminals to start fights with the ‘politicals’ and then suppressed the ‘politicals’ with brutal violence. More than twenty ‘politicals’ were murdered by the guards between March and May. As in other camps where there were rebellions, the guards’ provocations were almost certainly aimed at keeping the Gulag system going. Beria had made it clear that he wanted to dismantle the Gulag system, releasing all but the most dangerous criminals, so unless it could be shown that the release of ‘politicals’ was a danger to society, tens of thousands of Gulag guards and administrators would find themselves without a job.

  The prisoners in the Gorlag strike committees and conspiratorial groups were divided about what to do. Some were in favour of an uprising, but others thought that it was doomed to fail. They decided to arm themselves defensively. ‘We made knives from bits of steel,’ recalls Netto, who organized their secret manufacture in a workshop. There was no plan for an uprising, but in this atmosphere of heightened tension it was only a question of time before some further provocation led to a rebellion.118

  For Lev Netto these events were the culmination of a long process of political awakening that began in 1944, when Lev was dropped behind the German lines to organize the partisans in Estonia. Born into an Estonian family in Moscow, Lev had always thought of himself as a Soviet Russian with an Estonian background and he saw his mission in patriotic terms, but what he witnessed in his parents’ native land (the Red Army was guilty of pillage, rape and village-burning) made him think again about the Soviet forces as the ‘liberators’ of Estonia. The native population called the Soviet forces ‘Stalinist bandits’, and he couldn’t help but agree.

  Captured by the Germans, Lev was imprisoned in a camp with thousands of other Soviet POWs. This too was a moment of awakening, for he had always believed, in line with Soviet propaganda, that there were no Soviet POWs, only deserters. But here, as he recalls, were

  thousands of ordinary men, just like me, canon fodder for the Soviet regime… I began to feel a kind of revulsion against Stalin and the Soviet system, which had so deceived me and treated us [the soldiers] as less than human.

  Later, in the spring of 1945, when he was in a camp run by the US forces, Lev was able to contrast the Soviet system with the attitude of the Americans:

  Whenever the Americans came back from some operation they would hand in their guns. The next day they would get a different gun. But [in the Soviet army] each man was responsible for his own gun and, if he lost it, he would be dragged before a tribunal, to be imprisoned or even shot. The Americans placed a higher value on the individual. With us the individual counted for nothing.

  On his return to the Soviet Union, Lev was sent to a filtration camp and readmitted to the Red Army. In 1948, he was arrested as a ‘foreign spy’ and sent to Norilsk. There he fell in with Fyodor Smirnov, the leader of the Democratic Party, who encouraged him to see the Stalinist regime as a deviation from Marxist principles. The Democratic Party was held together by informal ties of trust and comradeship.* Because informers were a constant danger, nothing was written down, and everyone who joined had to have the personal recommendation of an existing member, who remained responsible for him. In this environment prisoners like Lev could develop and express their own political identity.119

  The uprising began on 25 May. Some guards had shot at a convoy of prisoners on their way to work. A protest strike quickly spread through all of Gorlag, including the female section, although its stronghold was in the fourth and fifth zones, where the prisoners – west Ukrainians, Poles and Balts – were militant and organized. They were armed with axes, knives and picks, but their main weapon was a hunger strike to put pressure on the camp authorities. ‘Our slogan was “Freedom or Death”,’ recalls Netto. ‘We wanted to be freed, and we were determined to fight for freedom even unto death. We thought it would be better to die fighting than to keep working and living in this inhuman way.’ It was time for Stalin’s slaves to prove themselves as citizens. The insurgents locked themselves into their barracks and raised black flags as a symbol of their protest against the arbitrary killing of their comrades. Each zone had its own strike leaders, but a general strike committee was quickly organized to present demands to the authorities. Netto served as a messenger and coordinator between the various zones, a dangerous task because he ran the risk of being shot every time he moved from one zone to another.120

  The strikers’ demands were all about respect and dignity. Despite their apocalyptic slogans, what the strikers actually asked for was relatively moderate and by no means anti-Soviet.121 They wanted the guards to call them by their names, not by the numbers on their prison clothes, which they asked to be removed. They wanted windows without bars in the barracks. They wanted an end to beatings by the gu
ards, and for the guards who had killed prisoners to be punished. They wanted a normal ten-hour working day instead of the fifteen-hour shifts which most prisoners were forced to work. They wanted to be able to write freely to their relatives instead of only twice a year. The strike committee refused to negotiate with the Norilsk authorities and demanded talks with the government in Moscow, aware that the local bosses could not make concessions without clearance from Moscow in any case. A few days later, on 5 June, Beria sent one of his senior officials to talk to the leaders of the strike. It was an extraordinary precedent: never before had the Kremlin responded to prisoners’ demands with anything but brutal force. Beria’s emissary promised to convey the strikers’ demands to the government. But he pleaded with them to resume their work, which he said was highly valued and important for the country as a whole. It was a clever ploy, because more than anything the strikers wanted recognition for their labour. In Netto’s words:

  We had made great sacrifices to provide the country with nickel, we were proud of our work, and when we heard these words of gratitude – and from no less a personage than Beria’s representative – it was like spiritual nourishment. It lifted our spirits and made us ready to go on. We were prepared to make further sacrifices, if only they would treat us as human beings, if only they would talk to us as human beings.122

  Among the rebels divisions arose between those who wanted to continue with the strike and those who preferred to return to work in the hope of wresting concessions from Moscow through cooperation. In truth, the fighters had no real prospect of holding on, let alone of winning: they were isolated in the prison zone, surrounded by soldiers and had minimal support from the rest of the Norilsk population. So when the chief prosecutor of Norilsk addressed the strikers over the loudspeaker system, calling on them to disperse and promising that they would not be punished, most of the prisoners obeyed. They were sorted into groups by the camp guards. The ringleaders were led away, the rest allowed to return to their barracks. A few thousand strikers resisted. In the sixth zone, on 7 July, 1,000 women formed a human circle, four rows deep, around a black flag and began to scream and whistle when the soldiers tried to drag them away; they kept up their din for five hours and were only broken up by water canon. In the fifth zone, 1,400 prisoners refused to leave and fought pitched battles with the soldiers, who opened fire, killing twenty prisoners. According to reports, the most stubborn resistance was in the third zone, where several hundred strikers locked themselves in the barracks and held out against the troops until 10 July. The unexpected leader of these rebels was Semyon Golovko, the young Cossack from the northern Caucasus, who suddenly discovered the courage in himself to lead this desperate fight. ‘I did not realize that I had it in me,’ he recalls. ‘At the beginning, when the soldiers were banging on the doors and threatening to shoot, I was very scared. I kept saying the Lord’s Prayer. But once I had taken charge, I no longer felt this fear.’ An estimated 500 prisoners were killed and 270 injured before the camp was taken by the troops.123