The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  As the thaw developed and Khrushchev’s reformers gained the upper hand in the Soviet leadership, Simonov became an increasingly isolated figure in the Moscow literary world. The liberal spirit of reform was not tolerant of Stalinist believers who refused to change their views. As Simonov put it in 1956:

  The editor can ask to cut away

  The name of Stalin from my verse,

  But he cannot help me

  With the Stalin who is left within my soul.

  It was only very gradually, after Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, that Simonov began to purge that inner Stalin from himself.79

  Khrushchev’s speech was a crucial watershed, more important than the death of Stalin, in the slow demise of the terror system that had ruled the Soviet people since 1917. With Khrushchev’s speech, it became clear that the Soviet government was finally distancing itself from Stalin’s reign of terror, and the people’s fear and uncertainty about the future gradually began to lift.

  The Twentieth Party Congress, the first since Stalin’s death, convened in the Great Kremlin Palace on 14 February 1956. The 1,355 voting delegates assembled in the expectation that the leadership would at last explain its post-Stalin line and clarify the status of the dead leader. The decision to expose and denounce Stalin’s crimes was made by the collective leadership – though there were bitter arguments about how far they should go – following the report by a special commission on the repression of Party members between 1935 and 1940 presented to the Central Committee on 9 February. The leadership was surprised by the commission’s findings – both by the huge scale of the mass arrests and executions and by the fabrication of the evidence on which this wave of terror had been based – and on the eve of the Party Congress it resolved to tell the truth to a closed and secret session of its delegates. The text of the speech was prepared collectively and Khrushchev, who had been the main driving force behind disclosure, took responsibility for its delivery on 25 February.

  Khrushchev’s motives were complex. It was certainly courageous to argue for disclosure when other Party leaders, such as Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov, were clearly uncomfortable with the idea of exposing the crimes of a regime in which they had played such important roles. During the discussions on 9 February, Khrushchev called for bold action:

  What sort of leader destroys everyone? We have to be courageous and tell the truth… We all worked with Stalin, but that does not implicate us. As the facts emerge, we have to speak of them, otherwise we are justifying his actions… We can speak with a clear voice. We are not ashamed. We have nothing to fear, and no reason to be satisfied by small-minded arguments.

  Disclosure also suited Khrushchev’s bid for power. He used the exposure of Stalin’s crimes to undermine or threaten his main rivals for the leadership, and to build a base of support in those sectors of society that embraced the thaw and political reform. But above all, perhaps, like the rest of the Party leaders, Khrushchev feared that, if they did not speak of Stalin’s crimes, the public would speak in their place, and that in the climate of the thaw critics of the Party would hold the entire leadership responsible. ‘Either you tell them at the upcoming congress, or you will find yourself under investigation,’ Khrushchev was warned by an old Party comrade, recently returned from the labour camps, whose testimony featured in his speech. By giving the impression that the Party leaders had discovered the truth about the Terror only recently, as a result of the commission which reported on 9 February, Khrushchev was able to shift the blame on to Stalin and clear the other leaders from suspicion, on the grounds that they ‘did not know’. To the same end Khrushchev offered a rather exculpatory explanation of the injustices committed by the Party since 1935: Stalin was held personally responsible for all of them, but other Party leaders were portrayed as victims of his ‘monstrous’ crimes (even the followers of Trotsky and Bukharin had not deserved to die). There was no question of blaming the Soviet system – only of struggling to ‘overcome the cult of personality’. The whole purpose of the speech was to restore Leninism to power.80

  Khrushchev ended his speech with a plea for secrecy:

  This subject must not go beyond the borders of the Party, let alone reach the press. That is why we are talking about this at a closed session… We must not provide ammunition for our enemies, we must not bare our injuries to them. I assume congress delegates will understand this and act accordingly.

  After he had finished speaking there was a ‘deathly silence’ in the conference hall. Aleksandr Iakovlev, later to become a leading figure in Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost, was one of the congress delegates. He recalls the scene:

  I sat in the balcony. I remember well the sense of profound disturbance, if not desperation, which took hold of me after Khrushchev spoke. The silence in the hall was profound. There was no sound of squeaking chairs, no coughing, no whispering. No one looked at anyone – whether from the unexpectedness of what had just occurred or from nervousness and fear… We left the conference hall with our heads bowed.

  Among the delegates who spilled out into the entranceway was Simonov, who stood there for a long time in a state of shock and confusion, smoking and talking with Igor Chernoutsan, the Central Committee’s cultural adviser. ‘We already knew a lot,’ recalls Chernoutsan, ‘but we were stunned by the way the truth caved in on us. But was it the whole truth?’81

  9

  Memory

  (1956–2006)

  1

  Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ did not remain secret very long. A transcript was printed in a brochure and sent to Party organizations across the Soviet Union with instructions for it to be read to Communists in all workplaces. In the weeks following the Twentieth Party Congress, the speech was heard by 7 million members of the Party and 18 million members of the Komsomol in Soviet factories and offices, universities and schools. The speech was also sent to the Communist governments of Eastern Europe. Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, tried to conceal it from the population of the GDR, but the Polish leaders published it, and a copy reached the New York Times, which ran it on its front page on 4 June. From the West, the text of Khrushchev’s speech filtered back to the GDR and the rest of the people of the Soviet Union.1

  The speech threw the Party into confusion. In local Party offices throughout the land there were animated discussions about what to make of the revelations, with some Party members blaming leaders who had failed to speak out earlier and others criticizing Khrushchev for raising these questions at an awkward time. By June 1956, the Central Committee was so concerned by these voices of dissent in the rank and file that it sent out a secret circular to local Party leaders calling on them to clamp down on criticism by purging and even imprisoning members who overstepped the accepted boundaries.2

  Outside the Party, some fearless people took Khrushchev’s speech as a signal to discuss and question everything. The intelligentsia was the first to speak. ‘The congress put an end to our lonely questioning of the Soviet system,’ recalls Liudmila Alekseyeva, a graduate of Moscow University who later joined the dissidents and emigrated to the USA.

  Young men and women began to lose their fear of sharing views, information, beliefs, questions. Every night we gathered in cramped apartments to recite poetry, read ‘unofficial’ prose and swap stories that, taken together, yielded a realistic picture of what was going on in our country.3

  Khrushchev’s speech took away the fear that had silenced many prisoners after their return from the Gulag – and now they began to speak as well. ‘The Twentieth Congress was the beginning of a thaw inside of us,’ recalls Larisa Levina, whose mother, Zinaida, returned to Leningrad from exile in 1956.

  My mother hardly said a word about her life in the labour camps [Kolyma from 1937 to 1946 and the Potma camps from 1949 to 1953]… But after the Twentieth Congress she started talking. And the more we talked, the more our ideas changed – we became more sceptical. Our relationships changed as well �
� freed from my mother’s fears, we became closer as a family.4

  Children of Stalin’s prisoners, burdened with the disadvantages of a ‘spoilt biography’, suddenly felt encouraged to voice their sense of injustice. Angelina Yevseyeva was working at a munitions factory in Leningrad when the text of Khrushchev’s speech was read out to the Party workers at the plant. Someone told her of the reading, which she managed to attend by slipping in unnoticed to the Party offices. At the end of the reading, Angelina became hysterical and sobbed uncontrollably. She recalls:

  No one understood what was wrong with me. I had a perfect curriculum vitae (anketa) and had even been elected as a deputy to the city Soviet. No one knew that my father had been arrested as an enemy of the people in 1937. I had never said a word to anyone. And I was always afraid that they would discover my secret. But when I listened to the speech, I felt released from this fear. That is why I cried. I could not help myself. After that, I started telling people the truth about my past.5

  For Lydia Babushkina, whose father had been shot in 1938, Khrushchev’s speech gave official sanction to the feelings of injustice she had harboured since her childhood, when her father disappeared. Before 1956, she was too frightened to talk about her feelings even to her mother and her grandmother, who were themselves afraid to talk about the arrest of Lydia’s father, mainly because they both worked in a munitions factory where they feared they would be sacked if their spoilt biography were discovered. Their silence had sometimes made her doubt her father’s innocence. But after Khrushchev’s speech, Lydia no longer had such doubts. At last she summoned up the courage, not just to question her mother about the arrest of her father, but also to express her feelings to her fellow workers at the clothing factory where she worked near Smolensk. One night in the dormitory attached to the factory, Lydia told the other girls that Stalin had been ‘the real enemy of the people’ because he had ordered the arrest of innocent citizens like her father. The other girls became frightened: ‘Quiet, quiet, they can arrest you for talk like that!’ But Lydia was not put off: ‘Let them. I’ll tell them, loud and clear, that I’m saying exactly what Khrushchev said. Let them listen, and they’ll realize that it’s the truth.’6

  But such talk was still exceptional. Even after 1956, the vast majority of ordinary people were still too cowed and frightened by the memory of the Stalinist regime to speak as openly or critically as Lydia did. The accepted understanding of the Khrushchev thaw – as a time of nationwide debate and political questioning – was largely shaped by the memoirs of the talkative intelligentsia, which are hardly representative. Open talk was possibly the norm among city intellectuals, who used the thaw to grapple with the history of the Terror, but for the mass of the Soviet population, who remained confused and ignorant about the forces that had shaped their lives, stoicism and silence were more common ways of dealing with the past.

  In 1957, Aleksandra Faivisovich, the hairdresser from Osa, spoke for the first time to her daughter Iraida about her arrest and the years which she had spent in the labour camp near Arkhangelsk, where she was then still living. Aleksandra’s rehabilitation, which she had just received, had given her the confidence to tell Iraida something about her past. Iraida recalls their conversation:

  She told me that she had a new passport [given to her on her rehabilitation], that the record of her arrest had been ‘wiped clean’, that she was innocent, and that therefore she could talk. But all she could bring herself to say was that my father had been put in prison ‘for his loose tongue’ [he had been overheard complaining about shortages in the shops]… and that she had been arrested because he was her husband. She said that many people had died in the camps – ‘they dropped like flies’ – that they got sick and no one cared for them. ‘They treated us like dogs.’ That was all she said.

  For the next quarter of a century, until her death in 1980, Aleksandra did not say another word to Iraida about her arrest or the labour camp. All she would say, when her daughter questioned her, was: ‘I have a new passport. I am clean.’7

  Zinaida Bushueva never spoke about the camps. She did not tell her children about the circumstances of her own arrest, or of the arrest of her husband, who was shot in 1938. Even in the last years of her life, in the late 1980s, she would put up her defences whenever she was questioned about the past. ‘In our family,’ recalls Angelina,

  no one talked about the reasons for my mother’s arrest, or why we had no father. It was a closed subject. After the Twentieth Party Congress, I tried to find out more, but Mama would just say: ‘The less you know, the easier to live,’ or ‘The more you know, the quicker you grow old.’ She had many of these expressions to close the conversation down.

  Zinaida Bushueva (centre) with her daughter Angelina and her son Slava, 1958

  According to her daughter, Zinaida took no interest in politics. ‘She could not allow herself.’ The fear she had brought back from the camps led her to adopt a position of ‘uncritical acceptance’ of everything she was told by the Soviet regime. She saw the contradictions between propaganda and reality, she had direct experience of the injustices of the regime, but, like millions of other ordinary Soviet citizens, she ‘never stopped to reflect critically’ on the reality she had observed. Acceptance of Soviet reality was a coping mechanism that helped her to survive.8

  Nadezhda Maksimov grew up completely unaware of her family’s history. Her father, a peasant from the Novgorod region, had worked as a carpenter in Leningrad. Arrested twice in the 1920s, he was rearrested in 1932, when Nadezhda was only three, and sent into exile with his family to Arkhangelsk, where Nadezhda spent her childhood oblivious to their reason for living in the Arctic Circle. Her father was arrested and imprisoned briefly yet again in 1938 (Nadezhda believed he was away on a work trip) before the family settled in Penza. In 1946, Nadezhda enrolled as a student at the Medical Institute in Leningrad and went on to become a physician. It was only shortly before her mother’s death in 1992 that Nadezhda found out about her father’s multiple arrests and the eight years he had spent in various prisons, labour camps and ‘special settlements’. She saw her father’s name in the newspaper, along with the names of her grandfather and her uncle, in a list of former political prisoners, posthumously rehabilitated after the collapse of the Soviet regime. Nadezhda showed the list to her mother, who at first said: ‘It was all so long ago. Why drag all that up again?’ But after Nadezhda insisted, her mother told her everything. Her parents had wanted to protect her by not putting her in a position where she would feel obliged to declare her spoilt biography. ‘Throughout my life, whenever I was asked to complete a questionnaire,’ explains Nadezhda,

  I was able to write ‘No’ in the section where they asked if I had any relatives who had been repressed, and because I did not know about my father, I was able to say that with a clear conscience, without any of the anxiety which I would have felt if I had been forced to lie. I’m sure that’s why I always got away with it.

  Her parents had maintained their silence even after 1956; they still thought it was too dangerous to tell her about their past, in case she told her friends, or the political circumstances changed. As a consequence, until the age of sixty-three, Nadezhda, as she herself admits, had little concern for the victims of the Stalinist regime – an indifference that was no doubt shared by other Soviet citizens whose lives were unaffected directly by the terror. Reflecting on her life in the 1930s and 1940s, Nadezhda recalls:

  I had heard about the repressions, but they made no impression on me whatsoever. In 1946, for example, there were mass arrests in the neighbouring village in Penza, but somehow they passed me by, I did not understand or even try to understand what was going on… Today I find it hard to explain this – that these events took place in parallel with my own life, but didn’t affect me in the least. Somehow I managed to avoid it all.9

  The grave of Nadezhda’s father, Ignatii Maksimov, Penza, 1994

  Tamara Trubina did not find out for over fifty years what had
happened to her father. All her mother, Kapitolina, told her was that he had disappeared in the Far East, where he had gone as a voluntary worker on various construction sites. Kapitolina had met Konstantin, an engineer, in 1935, when she, a young doctor, was sent by the Komsomol to work in the Gulag administration in Sychan, a small town near Vladivostok, where he was working as a penal labourer on a building site attached to the Gulag. In 1938, Konstantin was rearrested. Kapitolina had no idea where her husband was. She knew only that he had been sent to a labour camp somewhere in the Dalstroi Gulag network in north-east Siberia. After leaving the young Tamara with her mother in Perm, Kapitolina returned to work as a doctor in the labour camps of Kolyma. Because her marriage to Konstantin had not been registered and she had kept her maiden name, she was able to conceal her spoilt biography for several years. Eventually the commandant of the Gulag section where she worked found out about Konstantin, but the need for doctors in the camps was so acute that he kept Kapitolina’s secret and protected her. For thirty years, Kapitolina continued to work as a doctor for the NKVD, and then the MVD, rising to become a major in the Medical Division of the KGB, before her retirement in 1965. Until 1956, she never gave up hope that in the course of her travels around the labour camps of Kolyma she might discover Konstantin, or find out something about him. By helping other prisoners like him, she felt, at least, as she herself expressed it, that she was maintaining a link indirectly with her lost husband. Then, in 1956, she was told the truth: Konstantin had been executed in November 1938.