Finally, when rehabilitation was granted, it came with no apology for the citizen’s unjust arrest, let alone for the years wasted in a labour camp. In the eyes of most officials, the rehabilitation of a former criminal did not expunge all his guilt. As one ex-prisoner was reminded by a KGB major in 1960: ‘Rehabilitation does not mean that you were innocent, only that your crimes were not all that serious. But there’s always a bit left over!’47
For many people the need for rehabilitation was so strong that no obstacle could deter them. It was particularly important to former Party members and to those who had dedicated themselves to the public values of the Revolution of 1917. The recognition of their civic worthiness was fundamental to their personal dignity. For the same reason, many of these people wanted reinstatement in the Party. Only when they were given back their Party cards did they feel fully revalidated as Soviet citizens. The widow of an ‘enemy of the people’ who spent twelve years in the ALZhIR labour camp recalls her pride when she got her husband’s pension and notice of his posthumous reinstatement in the ranks of the Party. As the widow of a Party member, she got many special benefits which were not given to other repressed families (and this gave her a distorted view of the position of the rehabilitated generally), but these advantages were important to her first and foremost as a symbol of her reintegration in society:
Politically and as a citizen I felt that I had finally become a whole person again. More than that, I was in a sense a ‘hero of the day’. Those in the Party who were rehabilitated rose in social status. We were placed at the head of the queue for living quarters, holidays, financial help and so on.48
For others rehabilitation was important because it restored meaning to their lives and political beliefs. Despite the injustices they had suffered, many people still held firm to their commitment to the Soviet ideal. This belief gave meaning to their lives, and perhaps to their sacrifice. Many even took pride in the idea that their labour in the camps had made a contribution to the Soviet cause, as Aleksandr Degtiarev, a scholar at the Lenin Agricultural Institute, explained to the journalist Anatoly Zhukov in the 1970s:
I dug by hand so many precious metals in the labour camp that I could have ended up a multi-millionaire. That was my contribution to the Communist system. And the most important factor that ensured my survival in those harsh conditions was my unflinching, inextinguishable belief in our Leninist Party and its humanist principles. It was the Party that gave me the strength to withstand these trials. The Party kept alive our spirits and our consciousness, it helped us fight. Reinstatement in the ranks of the Communist Party was the greatest happiness of my entire life.49
There was another category of people who sought rehabilitation because they thought it would lift the shame that had been attached to their name. Maria Drozdova, who was released from the Norilsk camps, did not feel she was really free until she had been rehabilitated: ‘It was only then that I could look people in the eye with a sense of honour and with pride. Nobody could curse me any more.’50
Rehabilitation was a huge relief for the Turkin family, which had been stigmatized as the relatives of an ‘enemy of the people’ since 1936, when Aleksandr Turkin, the veteran Bolshevik and journalist from Perm, was arrested as a ‘Trotskyist’. For twenty years, Aleksandr’s wife and their two daughters believed that Aleksandr was guilty of some crime against the state: it was the only way they could explain the hostility of former friends and neighbours. Aleksandr’s mother-in-law had cut his face out of the family portrait in the living room (‘If we have an enemy among us, we must clear him out’) and since then the family had avoided all mention of him. So when Aleksandr’s wife was told that her husband had been innocent, and she then received his rehabilitation on appeal, it was a liberation for the family. At last they could talk, without a sense of shame, about the husband and the father they had lost.* ‘Once people learned that my father had been rehabilitated, they began to soften in their attitude towards us,’ recalls Aleksandr’s daughter Vera. ‘It was important for us morally, because we had doubted him as well, and it turned out that we had been wrong.’51
Not everyone saw rehabilitation as an adequate response. Some took the view that they had always known that they were innocent, that they did not need the vindication of a system that had proved itself unjust. This viewpoint was often to be found among older Party members, the followers of Lenin, who regarded Stalin as a ‘counter-revolutionary’. Others, such as Lev Netto, one of the leaders of the Norilsk uprising, who was released from the labour camp in 1956, refused to apply for rehabilitation, ‘on principle’. Speaking for his comrades in the uprising, Netto explains, ‘we all felt that we did not need forgiving by the state, which was guilty of a crime against us. It was a matter of our self-respect and dignity.’52
For many Party members and their families, rehabilitation was not enough to restore justice without reinstatement in the Party (which also meant they received extra compensation from the state). But the process of reinstatement was extremely slow, particularly in the provinces, where many Party organizations continued to be ruled by the old bosses, who had risen to the top by fabricating cases against ‘enemies of the people’ and risked losing everything if they now acknowledged their mistakes. Aleksandr Turkin was one of thirty Bolsheviks in Perm unjustly arrested as ‘Trotskyists’ in 1936. At the time of his rehabilitation, in 1956, the local press had raised the issue of their reinstatement in the Party, but despite the efforts of their families, the question was then buried by the Party organization, until it resurfaced in the glasnost period of the 1980s. But even then, the city’s leaders dragged their heels: not one of the thirty Bolsheviks was reinstated in the Party before its abolition in 1991.53
Unless they were reinstated in the Party, the compensation given to ex-prisoners on their rehabilitation was so derisory that many refused to take it. When Zinaida Bushueva was rehabilitated in 1957, she was given two months’ wages, calculated at the values of 1938, the year of her arrest, in compensation for the eight years she had spent in the ALZhIR labour camp, and another two months’ wages for her husband, who was shot in 1938 and rehabilitated posthumously ‘for failure to prove the charges’ against him. She used the money to buy a coat for her two daughters, a suit for her son and a table with six stools for the one-room flat they were given by the Soviet in Perm.54
Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg applied for rehabilitation for herself and her husband in 1954. She waited for two years before receiving the usual certificate, in which it was stated that her case had been reviewed and the charges dropped for lack of evidence. ‘I had paid for this mistake with twenty years and forty-one days of my life,’ she writes. In compensation, she was entitled to two months’ pay for herself and her dead husband, and a further 11 roubles and 50 kopecks to compensate for the 115 roubles which had been in the possession of her husband at the time of his death. In the waiting room outside an office in the Supreme Soviet building in Moscow, where she was presented with this gift, there were twenty other women, all receiving similar certificates. Among them was an old Ukrainian, who became hysterical when she was told what her son’s life was worth:
The old Ukrainian woman began to shout: ‘I don’t need your money for my son’s blood. Keep it yourselves, murderers!’ She tore up the certificate and threw it on the floor.
The soldier who had been handing out the certificates approached her: ‘Calm down, citizen,’ he began.
But the old woman started shouting again: ‘Murderers!’ She spat in his face and began to choke in a fit of rage. A doctor ran in with two assistants and took her away. Everyone was silent and subdued. Here and there were the sounds of stifled sobs. I too found it hard to contain myself… I returned to my apartment, from which no policeman could evict me now. There was nobody at home, and I was free to weep. To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubianka when he was thirty-seven years old and at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up as orphans, stigmatized as
the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for the twenty years of torture; and for friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma.55
Millions of people never came back from the camps. For their relatives, who were seldom told where they were or what had happened to them, the years after 1953 were a long and agonizing wait for their return, or for information about their fates. In many cases it was not until the 1980s, when ‘openness’ or glasnost became the watchword of the Soviet government, or even after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, that this wait came to an end.
Zinaida Bushueva never found out that her husband had been shot in 1938. Until her death, in 1992, she did not know whether he was dead, in which case she would have mourned for him, or whether he was still alive but had chosen not to return to his family, in which case she would have probably concluded that he had been guilty after all.56
Afanasia Botova continued to believe that her husband might still be alive until she died in 1981. Her husband had been arrested in 1937 at his work in the engineering workshops attached to the railway station at Perm. He was sent to Bamlag, the Gulag complex organized for the construction of the Baikal–Amur railway line, and from there to a camp near Magadan, where, as his daughter Nina was informed in 1989, he died from exhaustion in November 1940. None of this was known to Afanasia, who received a note from him in January 1941: ‘So far still alive. The temperature is minus 50 degrees.’ For forty years this tiny scrap of faded paper was enough for Afanasia to hold on to the hope that her husband would return.57
Elena Cherkesova clung to the belief that her husband was alive until she died in 1982. Her husband, Vsevolod, a geologist at the Mining Institute in Leningrad, was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to be shot in February 1938. Before his execution Vsevolod was allowed to phone his wife. He told her that they would never see each other again, but he did not say that he was about to be executed, telling her instead, as no doubt instructed by his executioners, that he had been sentenced ‘without rights to correspond’. Like millions of other relatives with loved ones in the labour camps, Elena did not understand that ‘without rights to correspond’ was Gulag code for the death sentence. After 1953, she presumed that his sentence must have ended, so she tried to track him down. She made inquiries at the MVD headquarters in Leningrad and wrote to the Soviet Procuracy in Moscow, but none of the officials would tell her anything. Shortly after her trip to the MVD headquarters, Elena was visited by a strange woman, who told her that she had been a prisoner in the same labour camp as Vsevolod and that she had seen him there a few years before. The woman encouraged Elena to believe that her husband was still alive.58
It was a common ploy of the MVD to deceive the relatives of executed prisoners in this way. Soviet officials took great care to cover up the facts of their killings. Their main concern was to hide the huge death toll of 1937–8 by claiming that the people executed in those years had died later, usually during the war years. They fabricated death certificates and informed relatives that prisoners had died from heart attacks or other illnesses when in fact they had been killed many years before.
Ida Slavina successfully appealed for the rehabilitation of her father in 1955. With the certificate of rehabilitation she received a death certificate from the registry in Leningrad which stated that her father had died of a heart attack in April 1939. Ida was puzzled because in 1945 she had been told by the Soviet authorities that her father was alive. She went to the headquarters of the MVD in Leningrad, where she was advised to trust the evidence of the death certificate. Ten years later, in 1965, when she applied for information from the KGB in Moscow, she received the same advice. Ida continued to believe this version until 1991, when she gained access to her father’s file in the KGB archives and discovered that he had been shot, only three months after his arrest, on 28 February 1938. In his file she also found an order from a KGB official in 1955, which stated that ‘for reasons of state security’ Ida should be misinformed that her father died of a heart attack in 1939.59
Irina Dudareva never gave up hope that she would find her husband after his arrest in the southern town of Azov, where he was the leader of the Party committee, on 30 August 1937. Ten years later, she had not heard anything from him, but he was due to be released, so she began to write to the MVD and to all the labour camps whose names and addresses she had collected from the relatives of other prisoners arrested in the Rostov region where she lived. Shortly afterwards she received a visit from a man, one of her husband’s former Party colleagues from Azov, who claimed that he had seen him in a labour camp, where, he said, he was alive and well. Irina went on writing to the authorities, who informed her that her husband was alive but still serving his sentence in a labour camp ‘without rights to correspond’. After 1953, she wrote with increasing frequency, assuming that her husband must surely now have been released, since she had never heard of anybody serving more than fifteen years in the labour camps; she thought she would have been told if his sentence had been extended for some reason. Finally, in 1957, Irina received a certificate stating that her husband had died from an illness in 1944. This is all Irina knew until her death in 1974. But in 1995, her daughter Galina was given access to her father’s file in the KGB archives, in which it was stated that he had been executed on the night of his arrest.60
4
‘Now those who were arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that sent these people to the camps and the one that came back.’61 With these words the poet Akhmatova anticipated the drama which unfolded as prisoners returned from the camps to confront the colleagues, neighbours, friends who had informed on them.
In 1954, Maria Budkevich came back to the communal apartment in Leningrad where she had lived with her brother and their parents until their arrest in 1937. Their two rooms had been taken over by the next-door neighbours, a married couple with three children. The wife had been on very friendly terms with the Budkeviches until the mass arrests of 1937, when she denounced them as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘foreign spies’ (Maria’s father was of Polish origin). She had even claimed that Maria’s mother was a prostitute who brought clients to the house. In 1954, the same woman, now grown old and thin with long white hair, was living in the rooms, her children having grown up and left the apartment, and her husband sent to a labour camp in 1941. Maria needed the woman to sign a document testifying to the fact that her family used to live there. She had recently received the rehabilitation of her parents, who had both been shot in 1937, and needed the document to apply for compensation for the living space and personal property which had been confiscated from the Budkeviches at the time of their arrest. The woman’s face went white when she heard Maria say her name. ‘I didn’t think you would come back,’ she said. Maria explained the purpose of her visit and reassured the woman that she had no intention of making any claim to her living space. The woman invited Maria to sit down while she read and signed the document. Maria looked around the room. She recognized her mother’s collection of ceramic pots, the leather sofa which her father had brought back from Minsk, cushions, lamps and chairs, familiar to her from her childhood. When she had signed the document, the woman asked Maria to sit down with her on the sofa. ‘There is something I must tell you,’ she whispered. The woman told Maria that, shortly after his arrest, her husband had written her a letter from the labour camp, which she had destroyed out of fear. He had written to tell her that during his interrogation they had knocked out all his teeth, that he did not think he would return from the labour camp, and that she should not wait for him but should marry someone else. Her husband never returned from the labour camps. She was telling Maria this, she explained, because she wanted her to understand that she had suffered too and that she was sorry about what had happened to her parents.62
Iurii Shtakelberg was arrested in 1948 on charges of belonging to a group of ‘Jewish nationalist students’ at Leningr
ad University. It was claimed that the group was organized and financed by a German baron as a ‘spy-ring’ against the Soviet Union. Iurii was accused of trying to set up a secret printing press to spread anti-Soviet propaganda in the university. The charges had no foundation. They were based entirely on a made-up story and denunciation signed by four of his fellow students at the university, who, it seems, were motivated largely by their xenophobia and had picked on Shtakelberg because of his foreign name (it is also possible that they knew about the arrest of Iurii’s father for ‘disseminating German propaganda’ in December 1941). In March 1949, Iurii was sentenced by a court in Leningrad to twenty-five years of hard labour. He was sent to the Bamlag camp (where his father had perished in 1942) and put to work building bridges for the railway. In 1956, he was seriously injured from a fall and released as an invalid. At first he lived in Luga and then finally he returned to Leningrad, taking a job in the Public Library. When Iurii was invited by the KGB to look at the records of his trial, he saw the names of his fellow students who had reported him. He paid a visit to each one in turn. ‘They all understood that I knew what they had done,’ recalls Iurii.
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