The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  The strikes were suppressed. But the labour camps were never really pacified. The prisoners’ demand for human dignity was ultimately irrepressible. Smaller strikes and demonstrations continued during 1953–4, until at last the regime recognized that it could not go on with the Gulag system and began to release the prisoners.

  8

  Return

  (1953–6)

  1

  After long delays, Sonia Laskina finally returned from Vorkuta in November 1955. The entire Laskin family waited at the Iaroslavl Station to meet her train. Apart from her sister Zhenia, who had been to visit her in the labour camp, none of them had seen her for the past five years. At last Sonia’s train arrived, and she emerged from the crowd of passengers alighting from her carriage, looking very tired, pale and thin. Sonia walked towards her family. Standing before Samuil and Berta, she dropped her bags, fell on to her knees on the platform and begged her parents to forgive her for all the misfortune that she had brought them.

  Like so many of the people who returned from Stalin’s labour camps, Sonia was burdened with a sense of guilt for the grief her arrest had caused. In Vorkuta, she had starved herself of food so that she could send some money home and had become dangerously thin. After her return, she lived for her family. At the age of forty-four, without a husband or children of her own, she dedicated herself to the welfare of her parents and to the children of her two sisters. ‘There was nothing she would not do for us,’ recalls her nephew Aleksei. ‘She was ready to drop everything if she felt that she was needed, to search the shops for medicine or run some errand. Her devotion to the family had an almost religious character, it had an element of self-negation and self-sacrifice, although she herself was not a religious person in the least.’1

  Following the Russian tradition of freeing prisoners on the death of a tsar, a million prisoners were released from the labour camps by the amnesty of 27 March 1953, a figure representing about 40 per cent of the total population in the Gulag. In addition to convicts serving sentences of less than five years, the amnesty applied to prisoners convicted of economic crimes, women with young children, juveniles and prisoners who had reached retirement age. Political prisoners were excluded from the amnesty. Their cases needed to be reviewed by the Soviet Procuracy, a process that could take several years, especially in cases such as Sonia’s, where senior Party leaders (in her case Khrushchev) had been implicated in the creation of ‘anti-Soviet plots’. By the end of April 1955, the Soviet Procuracy had reviewed 237,412 appeals from political prisoners (less than a quarter of the appeals it had received since March 1953) but only 4 per cent had resulted in the release of the prisoners concerned.2

  There was no rhyme or reason to these decisions. For example, the Stalin Factory Affair, in which Sonia was involved, had its origins in the ‘Zionist conspiracy’, supposedly organized by Solomon Mikhoels, the former head of the Jewish Theatre in Moscow. Mikhoels himself was posthumously rehabilitated on 3 April 1953, and after that he was praised frequently as a loyal patriot in the Soviet press. Yet in November of that year Sonia was informed by the General Procurator that there were no grounds to justify a review of her case. A prisoner in the Inta labour camp who had also been arrested in connection with the Stalin Factory Affair was outraged when he got a similar response. It came in a letter with the single sentence, ‘No grounds for a review of the case’, which he was meant to sign and return to the Procurator to acknowledge its receipt. ‘There is no logic in it,’ he compained to his fellow prisoners. If Mikhoels was innocent, why wasn’t he? One of the other prisoners replied: ‘Sign the letter now – and they will send the logic later on.’3

  The Soviet leadership was divided over how far to go with the release of prisoners. Immediately after Stalin’s death, Beria had argued for a general amnesty for all prisoners who ‘did not represent a serious danger to society’, including 1.7 million political exiles. Beria was the dominant figure in the collective leadership of Politburo members that took control on Stalin’s death. With his power base in the MVD and MGB, he ran the government in partnership with Malenkov (Chairman of the Council of Ministers) and Voroshilov (Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet), although Khrushchev (the Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee) was bitterly opposed to Beria and campaigned against him from the start with the support of Nikolai Bulganin (the new Defence Minister). Senior Party and military leaders were certainly suspicious of Beria’s programme, which involved the immediate dismantling of the Gulag system and the relaxation of Soviet policies in the newly annexed territories of western Ukraine, the Baltic region and East Germany. In the spring of 1953, Beria imposed a series of reforms on the East German leadership. The Communist hardliners in Berlin dragged their heels over implementing the measures, resulting in a week of mass demonstrations on the streets of East Berlin that were put down by Soviet tanks. Back in Moscow, Beria was blamed for the uprising by Khrushchev, Bulganin, Molotov and even Malenkov. On 26 June, he was arrested in a Kremlin coup, organized by Khrushchev with senior army personnel in the Soviet capital. Held in an underground bunker at the Staff Headquarters of the Moscow Military District, he was tried in secret and then shot in December 1953 (it is even possible that he was shot before his trial). There was no legal basis for the coup: the charges against Beria were extremely vague (there was nothing he had done without the agreement of the collective leadership); and the verdict against him was announced to the Party long before his trial was held. But none of the leaders opposed the coup, or even questioned its legality. Trained in the traditions of Stalinist obedience to the Party line, they were a docile group of functionaries, quick to bend their principles when they sensed a shift of power at the top. Khrushchev emerged from the coup with new confidence. Simonov recalls the Party Plenum of 24 December when the execution of Beria was announced. He was struck by the ‘passionate satisfaction’ with which Khrushchev recounted the ‘capture’ of Beria: ‘You could tell from his account that it was Khrushchev himself who had played the main role… that he had instigated the action, and had turned out to be more discerning, more talented, more energetic, and more decisive than the other leaders,’ who had no choice but to submit.4

  Although Malenkov was formally the head of the Soviet government, Khrushchev was the growing force inside the collective leadership. The coup had nothing to do with policies: it was a naked struggle for power. Khrushchev had supported Beria’s programme and he now took it for his own. From the end of 1953, Khrushchev introduced a series of reforms to reinforce the principles of ‘socialist legality’, a term used throughout the Soviet period but never taken very seriously. He ordered a review by the Soviet Procurators of all cases involving ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’ since 1921. Khrushchev took a particular interest in the Leningrad Affair, in which his rival Malenkov had served as Stalin’s main henchman. In April 1954, several MGB officials closely linked to Malenkov at the time of the Leningrad Affair were arrested. Malenkov was clearly under threat. For the moment, Khrushchev held back the evidence he had gathered against Malenkov – he still needed his support in the collective leadership – but in the early months of 1955, as Khrushchev launched his bid for the control of the Party, he saw to it that Malenkov was charged with ‘moral responsibility’ for the Leningrad Affair and demoted from Chairman of the Council of Ministers to Minister of Electrification.

  Khrushchev used the exposure of Stalin’s crimes to strengthen his position and undermine his rivals in the leadership (what he did to Malenkov in 1955 he would do to Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov at the Party Congress in 1961). It was a dangerous game to play, because Khrushchev had himself been deeply implicated in the mass repressions of the 1930s, first as the Moscow Party boss in 1935–8, and then as Party chief of Ukraine, when he oversaw the arrest of at least a quarter of a million people. But Khrushchev was able to limit the Procurators’ activities if they went against his own interests. The Stalin Factory Affair was one such example. Because Khrushchev was involved, ther
e were long delays in the review of prisoners’ appeals that might throw up incriminating evidence against him. In June 1954, Sonia Laskina was promised a response to her appeal by August; in August she was told that it would be done by September; in September this became October, then November; and then in February 1955, she heard that it would be completed by the end of March. The case was finally considered in September 1955.5

  Like the other Party leaders, Khrushchev was afraid of what might happen if all of Stalin’s victims were suddenly released. ‘We were scared,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘We were afraid that the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which would drown us all.’ According to Mikoian, a Politburo member for over thirty years, it would have been politically impossible for all the ‘enemies of the people’ to be declared innocent at once, because that would make it clear that ‘the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters’. The Party leadership had no real interest in speeding up the release of political prisoners. Nor did the officials of the Procuracy, who were reluctant to admit mistakes in the prosecution of politicals, let alone to confess their part in the fabrication of evidence against them during Stalin’s terror. In 1954, serving the interests of both institutions, the staff of the Soviet Procuracy was cut by two-thirds, thereby prolonging the procedural delays.6

  The Laskin family at their Ilinskoe dacha near Moscow, 1956.

  From left: Zhenia, Berta, Sonia, Samuil, Fania

  The Laskin family was one of the lucky ones. They were able to return to the old rhythms of domestic life, and in many ways they became even closer after Sonia came back from the labour camps. Sonia herself was invited to take up her old job at the Stalin Factory. After months of writing applications to the Procuracy and battling with officials in Soviet offices, she received a certificate of rehabilitation, clearing her of all the charges against her, restoring her civil rights and entitling her to a small sum in compensation for the five years she had wasted in the labour camp. Sonia was given a small room in a communal apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, which was used by various relatives, as were all the places where the Laskins lived. The famous Laskin suppers at Zubov Square carried on as usual on Sunday evenings. The apartment was always full of family and friends, including some, like the poet Lugovskoi, Simonov’s old teacher at the Literary Institute, who became part of the extended clan. Aleksei, who was already sixteen when Sonia returned, recalls the atmosphere of the Laskin home:

  It was a place of extraordinary warmth and hospitality governed by the outlook of my grandfather [Samuil Laskin]. He ran it by this rule: anyone who came into our home was welcomed as a member of the family. Once I tried to test this rule: for several Sundays in a row I brought home to dinner various girls I had picked up on the streets. No one said a word, not even my mother, who was morally very strict, because those were Samuil’s rules.7

  The return of relatives from the labour camps drew many families closer. Years of separation brought home the joys of domestic life even to those Bolsheviks who had once lived entirely for politics. Before her arrest in 1937, Ruth Bonner had taken little interest in the upbringing of her two children. She was totally committed to her work in the Party. The letters she wrote to her teenage daughter Elena from ALZhIR were cold and loveless, with instructions for her to study hard, ‘help your grandmother’, and ‘be a model Komsomol’. Her main concern was to petition Mikoian (an old friend) to save her husband, who had been arrested in the purge of the Comintern in 1937, insisting in her letters that he ‘had always been faithful to the Party’. Released in 1946, Ruth was not allowed to return to Leningrad, so she settled in Luga, 135 kilometres to the south, where, with the help of Elena’s friends, young poets, she got a job as a housemother at the Writers’ Union Pioneer camp. Meanwhile, Elena had returned to Leningrad from the army, having spent the war years serving as a military nurse, and was studying pediatrics at the Medical Institute. She shared a room with several girlfriends (including Ida Slavina) and, during the winter, when the Pioneer camp was closed, Ruth would come to visit her. At first their relations were tense. ‘I could tell that she didn’t share our post-war jollity and didn’t approve of our way of life,’ recalls Elena in her memoirs.

  Now I understand that each of us had her own experiences. She had the death of her husband, prison, and camp. I had my own losses and, as it seemed then, a completely different life. Neither of us knew how to be open with the other, and I didn’t want that. I was annoyed by the way Mama still treated me like the fourteen-year-old she had left, and her questions drove me crazy: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘When will you be back?’

  Reflecting on these years in interview, Elena admits: ‘I often wished my mother would just go to hell. I couldn’t kick her out, but I could drop out of the institute and run away somewhere, anywhere to earn a living, as long as I was free from her.’ After the birth of Elena’s daughter Tania in 1950, there was a dramatic change in Ruth’s priorities. ‘We found a common focus – the upbringing of her granddaughter – and that brought us closer,’ recalls Elena. From that moment, Ruth ceased to have any real interest in politics. Although she rejoined the Party after her return to Leningrad and her rehabilitation in 1954, she never played an active role and, according to Elena, remained a member ‘mainly because she was afraid for us, above all for her grandchildren’.* ‘Only the grandchildren [Tania and her brother Aleksei] mattered,’ Elena recalls. ‘It was amazing how much warmth and inner radiance she had preserved for them.’ Ruth was rediscovering the values of her own mother, Elena’s beloved grandmother Batania, who had taken charge of her grandchildren while her children dedicated themselves to their Party work. Reflecting on this transformation in her mother’s character, Elena Bonner remembers the morning of Ruth’s funeral in December 1987:

  I was getting tablecloths from the cupboard, setting the tables for the wake. The first to fall on me was a heavy cloth with coloured embroidery… Under it was the pink one! Now, after innumerable washings, it merely gave off a pink tint, and Mama’s beautiful and fine mending stood out in bright pink. Could I have ever imagined that my mother, a Party worker, antibourgeois and maximalist, who never allowed herself to use a tender word to Egorka or me, would be mending tablecloths, sewing dresses for me, dressing up Tania, that she could turn into a ‘crazy’ grandmother and great-grandmother, for whom her grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be the ‘chief light in the window’, the justification for all the losses of her entire life? I couldn’t even imagine that she would come to love potted flowers on the windowsill and tend them, making them grow and live. Or that she would turn in her Party card with a certain pride and challenge. This was not a demonstration for the sake of the Party or a settling of accounts… It was simply that with that difficult, almost impossible step she fully gave herself to us, her warm, living love, which was higher and greater than abstract ideas and principles. She said almost before her death that in life you must simply live in a good and kind way.8

  Families had a miraculous capacity for survival despite the enormous pressures arrayed against them during Stalin’s reign. The family emerged from the years of terror as the one stable institution in a society where virtually all the traditional mainstays of human existence – the neighbourhood community, the village and the church – had been weakened or destroyed. For many people the family represented the only relationships they could trust, the only place they felt a sense of belonging, and they went to extraordinary lengths to reunite with relatives.

  Few people made quite as many sacrifices as Valentin Muravsky. He was born in 1928 to the family of a radio engineer in Leningrad. In 1937, after the arrest and execution of his father as an ‘enemy of the people’, Valentin was exiled with his sister Dina and his mother to Uzbekistan, from which they returned to Leningrad in 1940. During the war, when they were evacuated to Cherkessk, near Stavropol, the three of them were captured by the Germans and sent to work in various factories in Austria an
d Germany. In 1945, Dina was working at a factory near Nuremberg that was liberated by US troops. She married an American officer and emigrated to the USA. But Valentin returned to Leningrad, where he was reunited with his mother. The war had made him think more critically about the Soviet system and about the reasons for the arrest of his father. His experience in Germany had led him to conclude that one could live more freely in the West, a view he expressed in letters to his sister in America. In 1947, Valentin was arrested and interrogated by the MGB, which tried to persuade him to convince his sister to return to the Soviet Union. When Valentin refused, he was charged with ‘anti-Soviet propaganda’ and sentenced to three years in a labour camp near Krasnoiarsk. His mother was arrested in 1948, also on the basis of her correspondence with Dina, and sentenced to ten years in the ALZhIR labour camp. Valentin was released in 1950. He went to live with an aunt in Anapa, on the Black Sea coast near Krasnodar, and found a job in a cement factory. But he was soon conscripted by the Soviet navy and sent to Sevastopol, where he was forced to serve for the next four years. He married a nineteen-year-old girl from Sevastopol, and they had a daughter, who was born in 1953.