The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  I did not really have anything to say. I no longer felt like opening my heart to him, as I had in the early years. And the letters he wrote to me were really nothing more than political reports. They were all about the Party conferences he had attended, or about the books that he had read. There was nothing personal in them. I had lost the father of my dreams.19

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  Bulat Okudzhava tells the story of how he met his mother when she returned from the labour camps in his ‘autobiographical tale’ The Girl of My Dreams (1988). The future poet and songwriter was just twelve years old when his mother was arrested and sentenced to ten years in the Karaganda labour camps in 1937, following the arrest of her husband, a Communist official of Georgian origin. Bulat was brought up by his grandmother in Moscow and then went to live with his father’s family in Tbilisi. In 1941, at the age of seventeen, just before his graduation from high school, he volunteered for the army. After his demobilization in 1945, he became a student at Tbilisi University. His mother spent a total of eighteen years in the Gulag, returning from the camps in 1955.

  In The Girl of My Dreams Okudzhava revisits the night of her return. The narrator is a student, ‘an innocent young man’, who lives with a flatmate in a one-room apartment. He is happy because he is in love. The one source of sadness in his life is the absence of his mother. He keeps a photograph of her when she was young, ‘with big brown almond eyes’, and recalls her gentle smile and tender voice. One day a telegram arrives: ‘Meet the 501. Mama.’ On his way to the station he imagines their reunion as a happy and simple occasion:

  I meet her. We eat at home. The two of us. She tells me about her life, and I tell her about mine. We don’t analyse, or try to understand the motives of those who were to blame. What took place is over, and now we are together again… And then I take her to the cinema and let her relax a bit.

  But things turn out differently. The arrival of the special train, the 501, with prisoners, is delayed several times, and when he comes at midnight to meet it, he learns that it arrived an hour earlier. He finds his mother walking to his house. They embrace and walk home together in silence. At his apartment she sits at the kitchen table and smokes constantly. When he looks into her eyes, he does not see the ‘big, brown almond eyes’ but something else:

  Her eyes were cold and remote. She looked at me, but she did not see me. Her face was frozen, turned to stone, her lips slightly open, her sunburned hands resting weakly on her knees. She did not say a word.

  She cannot hold a conversation. She does not understand what her son says. When he asks her if she wants something to eat, she says, ‘What?’ And when he asks again, she says, ‘Me?’ She does not ask her son about his life. She mutters only isolated words, the names of places near her camp. She is frightened of her son’s flatmate and asks him if he comes from the camps as well, suspecting that he might be an informer. She is afraid to leave the house. When her son drags her to the cinema, she leaves after a few minutes, before the film begins.20

  People returned from the labour camps physically and mentally broken. A few years in the Gulag was enough to make a person prematurely old. Some prisoners had aged so much that they were barely recognized by relatives when they came home. Ivan Uglitskikh was thirty-three when he was released from Kolyma and returned to Cherdyn. In an interview he recalls his homecoming:

  I came back in November 1953. I had not seen my family for thirteen years. My younger brother was living in our old house. He was not in, he had gone to get some hay, and his wife did not know who I was. We sat down for some tea, and when she said that I looked like her husband, I told her that I was his brother, but that she was not to tell him when he arrived. I wanted to surprise him. My brother arrived with the hay, put it in the barn and came to join us… He saw that there were guests – the samovar was on the table, and there was a bottle of vodka… His wife said to him: ‘Do you know who this is?’ And he said: ‘No, who is it? An old man passing through?’ And then he said to me: ‘Where are you going, old man?’ He did not know who I was at all. We sat there drinking tea’[Ivan breaks down and ends the interview].21

  People came back from the camps with physical deformities and chronic illnesses. Fruza Martinelli, the wife of the director of the Dallag Gulag complex until his arrest in 1937, returned to Moscow from the labour camps of Kazakhstan as an invalid. She had been tortured and beaten heavily in the labour camps, and her body was covered with the marks. Her daughter Elena never knew about these beatings, until her mother’s death in 1960, when the doctors questioned her about scars and bruises. ‘They said they had never seen a body so damaged,’ Elena recalls. ‘Even the heart had been beaten out of place.’

  ‘Was your mother in a labour camp?’ they asked. They could not imagine how my mother could have survived in such a state. It was only then that I understood why my mother was so coarse and cruel when she returned from the camp. She was always swearing, hitting us and breaking things in one of her temper fits. I used to ask her if she had been beaten in the camp, but she refused to say. ‘There are things one cannot talk about,’ she used to say. And I never asked her again.

  Fruza Martinelli, 1956

  Elena found it increasingly difficult to live with her mother, who became fanatically religious and showed signs of mental derangement after her return from the labour camp. Fruza was violent towards Elena’s son, who was born handicapped in 1953. She would break his toys and steal his sweets, which she hid with other food in her bedding. Unable to cope with her behaviour, Elena moved to Leningrad in 1958.22

  Gertrud Ielson-Grodzianskaia had pictured her mother in the ALZhIR labour camp as ‘good and beautiful and living in a distant land’. It was an image she had formed from the letters that her mother had sent her, and from the little presents she had made for her, like the embroidered towel with pictures of animals. When Gertrud was fourteen, her mother was released from the labour camp and allowed to settle outside an exclusion zone of 100 kilometres from Moscow. She chose to live near Vladimir, where she found a job as an agronomist on a collective farm. She passed through Moscow, where Gertrud lived with her uncle’s family, on her way from ALZhIR to Vladimir. Gertrud went to meet her at the station:

  Suddenly a woman stepped off the train. She was dressed in a sheepskin and had a plywood case and a rucksack. Her head was shaved. She smelled frightfully. She had been travelling for a week. We brought her home, and I was asked to help her wash… I heated the water on the kitchen stove and helped her to undress. The smell was overpowering. It was a real shock. She had lice all over her body and cockroaches in her clothes. I was repulsed. I did not see this woman as my mother but as someone else.23

  Esfir Slavina was released from the ALZhIR labour camp in 1943. Forbidden to return to Leningrad, or to any of the other major cities in the Soviet Union, she was rescued by her daughter Ida, who was already working as a teacher in Novosibirsk and arranged for them to live in an empty office at the school. Ida recalls her mother’s appearance:

  She was very thin and brown, burned by the sun of Kazakhstan and showing all the signs of having suffered from malaria. She did not look at all like her old self. She was not the mother I had known. She was sick and hardly able to move, and relied on me for everything.

  In 1944, Esfir moved to Moscow, where her son, a research scientist, had received permission for her to live with him. Ida married a schoolteacher in Novosibirsk. In 1945, she returned to Leningrad, where she lived in a communal apartment with five other families. Esfir lived illegally with them so that she could help with Ida’s new-born son, who was often ill. In 1949, Esfir was rearrested for breaking passport regulations (she was not registered to live in Leningrad) and exiled to the town of Malaia Vishera, 110 kilometres to the south-east, where she lived in terrible conditions, unable to cope on her own, without work and constantly harassed by the local residents, who took against her as a ‘political’, which in their eyes made her a ‘fascist’. Six months after her arrival in Malaia Vishera, Esfir w
as arrested yet again, this time as an ‘anti-social element’, and exiled to Shadrinsk, in western Siberia, where she lived in the cheapest rented room on the outskirts of the town. Without a job, she lived on the money Ida sent each month. In 1951, Esfir was finally allowed to return to Leningrad. ‘She was completely broken,’ recalls Ida, who took care of her:

  She was silent nearly all the time. She was afraid to speak and spoke only in whispers. You had to coax every word from her: as soon as she said anything she would immediately regret it. She never told me anything about the camp. I tried to get it out of her, my brother tried as well, but it was no use. She was afraid to go out of the house. If she was in the street and saw a policeman she would run to hide in the entrance of a building and not come out until she was sure that the policeman had disappeared. This was totally out of keeping with her character; she had always been strong and confident. But she came home from the camp a different person. Her confidence was gone, so was her health; she had two strokes in the first three years after her return. And she had lost all her liveliness and sociability. She never wanted to see anyone. She spent her last years bed-ridden.24

  Left: Esfir and Ida in 1938. Right: Esfir in 1961.

  The ALZhIR camp had a different effect on Zinaida Bushueva. It made her cold and strict, according to her daughter Angelina, who was ten years old when her mother was released. Zinaida did not like to talk about the past. She was emotionally withdrawn. ‘It was very hard to live with her,’ recalls Angelina.

  She was silent all the time. She never talked to us about what she was thinking or feeling. And I blamed her for that. I wanted her to talk. But perhaps she wanted to protect us from everything she had suffered… She was always very distant from us. She would never show affection, she would never stroke our hair or hold us close. Her idea of being a mother was to make sure that we were fed, that we went to school and that we remained physically healthy – but that was all. She gave us nothing spiritually or emotionally. The truth is, after the camp, she had nothing left to give.

  Angelina attributes her mother’s emotional austerity to the labour camp, where Zinaida had requested heavy manual work so as not to have time to think about the children she had lost. Closing herself off had become a mechanism of survival, and it continued as a means of coping with the problems of return. This same instinct for survival manifested itself in her obsessive eating: she would carry bits of bread around with her, hoard supplies of food and get up in the night to eat something because she was afraid of feeling hunger.25

  Liuba Babitskaia came back to Moscow from the ALZhIR labour camp in 1947. Forbidden to settle in the capital, she came back illegally in search of work and family and friends. Despite his earlier efforts to persuade her to return to him, her first husband, the filmmaker Anatoly Golovnia, had begun an affair with a young production assistant (and probably an agent of the NKVD) called Tatiana Lobova, who exercised a malign influence on him and alienated all his relatives, most of all his daughter Oksana, who saw their romance as a betrayal. Physically exhausted, her film-star looks all gone, Liuba was shunned by most of

  Liuba after her return, Moscow, 1947

  her old friends in Moscow. ‘As soon as people recognized her as the former wife of Golovnia, the widow of the executed Babitsky, they crossed the street to avoid her,’ recalls Oksana. The one person who came to Liuba’s aid was the actress Liubov Orlova, an old friend who may have felt some guilt because her husband, the film director Grigorii Aleksandrov, who had close ties to the NKVD, had been behind the denunciations at the Mezhrabpomfilm studios that led to the arrest of Babitsky. Orlova took Liuba in and suggested that she contact Mikhail Gurevich, the Deputy Minister of Geology, who, she said, might help her get permission to remain in Moscow and find a job. ‘All his life he has been in love with you,’ Orlova explained, calling Gurevich and passing the receiver to Liuba. Gurevich asked Liuba where she was, and then said: ‘Wait for me, I am coming now. We will get married.’ Thanks to their marriage Liuba got rights of residence and a job in Moscow; Gurevich was dismissed from his post.

  When Liuba was arrested in 1938, her daughter Oksana was eleven years old; by the time she returned, just nine years later, the girl had become a wife and mother. ‘Relations between us were very difficult,’ recalls Oksana. ‘Something had broken in our relationship – there was so much pain, love, jealousy, all mixed up with estrangement, a yearning for closeness, to understand each other, and at the same time an inability to find the words to communicate.’ Liuba wanted to control Oksana’s life. In 1948, when her daughter started an affair with an American diplomat, she became frightened and threatened to report her to the MVD for contacts with a foreigner unless she broke it off. Oksana’s husband, Albert Rikhter, a naval officer from a German-Jewish family in Odessa, had already been arrested and sentenced to ten years in Magadan for ‘espionage’, so the report would probably have led to her arrest. In the end, Liuba used her connections with Gurevich to send Oksana to Siberia as an assistant on a geological expedition, which brought the affair to an end.

  Liuba returned from the camps with a different personality: the warmth and affection that she had once shown as a mother had all gone, and in its place was a new harshness and insensitivity. She never gave affection to her grandchildren. If they fell and hurt themselves, she would tell them to get up and stop crying, because there was ‘much worse’ that could happen to hurt them, ‘things that would really make [them] cry’. Liuba brought home the customs of the camps. She was selfish, even greedy, when it came to food; short-tempered, sometimes cruel and violent; emotionally closed to everyone. ‘She kept a suitcase packed with winter clothes and dried food beneath her bed in case they came for her again,’ recalls her granddaughter. ‘She was terrified of the telephone and doorbell when they rang at night, and took fright when she saw policemen in the street.’ These camp traces remained in her character. ‘A person who is released from the camps is afraid of freedom,’ Liuba wrote in her last notebook, just before she died in 1983. ‘Deeply wounded once, you are forever easily hurt again.’26

  Many people came back from the camps with nervous habits and obsessions. Elena Cherkesova would count the steps she took at home. It was a habit she had picked up in the Temnikovsky camps as a way of maximizing her efficiency and avoiding all unnecessary exertions. Elena had never worked before she was sent to the camps, and she was exhausted by the regime there, which pushed her to the brink of starvation. During the war years, in particular, when the work quotas for Gulag prisoners were raised, Elena had often failed to meet her quota, which meant that she received less bread. To save her energy she taught herself to keep her steps to a minimum. A similar obsession was brought back from the labour camps by Aleksandra Fillipova. She was paranoid about people stealing her food. Living with her daughter in a communal apartment, she would conceal bits of food in hiding-places in their room and then forget having eaten them. When she looked for the food and found that it was gone, she would accuse her daughter, or the other neighbours, of having taken it. Relations with her daughter became so bad that Aleksandra forced her to move out of the apartment.27

  Mikhail Nikolaev had grown up in a children’s home. He did not know who his parents were. He spent his teenage years in the Red Army, and then fifteen years in various labour camps. In every institution where he had lived there had been a struggle over food – a constant battle to get the glass or plate that was most full – so that he had learned to grab whatever he could without thinking about anybody else. The thirty-six-year-old who was released from the labour camps had no idea how to behave in a normal family home, never having been in one. A large handsome man with a thick beard, he was known in the literary circles of Moscow as a ‘wild man from Mars’, recalls Viktoriia Shweitser, who fell in love with him and married him. When she introduced him to her family, she was shocked by his table manners. She could not understand how he could help himself to all the food from the table without offering it to others first. For a long
time, she said nothing, but one day she finally lost her patience and told him off for grabbing the last orange instead of leaving it for the children, as was the custom in their household. ‘Mikhail replied: “I didn’t know, nobody ever taught me that, why didn’t you explain it to me?”,’ recalls Viktoriia. ‘He was not greedy, but as he said about himself, he was tight-fisted’, perhaps even selfish, because of the way he had grown up. As she recalls in interview, it was at this point that she realized that she had fallen in love with a man whom she did not really know. ‘I had to learn to fall in love with him again, only this time with the real Misha, the boy from the orphanage, so that I could understand him properly and help him live a normal life.’28

  It was often very hard for people who returned from the labour camps to re-establish relationships with relatives. After years of living in the Gulag, what sort of ‘normal family life’ could they hope to lead? There was no counselling or psychoanalysis for these people, no help for their physical and behavioural disorders, not even any recognition of the traumas they experienced. At the same time, those who returned often had little understanding of the tension under which their families had lived or the horrors they had suffered in the intervening years. People on all sides – those who had returned from the camps and those who had remained at home – felt rejected and estranged.