The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Tamara and Kapitolina, 1948

  For nearly twenty years, Kapitolina had lived in constant fear that her colleagues would find out that her husband was an ‘enemy of the people’. She was afraid to speak of Konstantin even with her family. So the revelation that he had been shot – which she took as evidence that he may well have been guilty of a serious crime – made her even more withdrawn and silent about him. She said nothing to her daughter, who asked about her father with increasing frequency. ‘Mama never spoke about my father,’ recalls Tamara.

  She kept all his letters [from the 1930s] and some telegrams, but she never showed them to me. She always steered the conversation on to other subjects. She would say, ‘I don’t know what he did.’ The most she would say was, ‘Perhaps his tongue got him into trouble.’

  After her mother’s death, in 1992, Tamara was advised by her uncle, a senior official in the KGB, to write to his police colleagues in Vladivostok and ask for information about Konstantin. The reply she received informed her that her father had been shot in 1938 on charges of belonging to a ‘Trotskyist organization’, but it made no mention of his imprisonment in any labour camp. So she continued to believe that Konstantin was a voluntary worker in the Far East, as her mother had told her, and that he had fallen out of favour with the Soviet authorities only during 1938. It was only in 2004, when Tamara was interviewed in Perm in connection with this book, that she learned the whole story. Shown the documents which proved that her father was a long-term prisoner in the Gulag, she at first refused to believe them and insisted that there must be a mistake. Mentally she was not prepared to see herself as a ‘victim of repression’ in the Soviet system where she had enjoyed a successful career as a teacher and perceived herself as a member of the Soviet establishment. Perhaps, Tamara acknowledged, she owed her success to her mother’s silences: had she known the truth about her father, she might well have hesitated to make a career for herself.10

  The suppression of traumatic memories has been widely noted as a psychic self-defence for victims of repression in all totalitarian regimes, but in the Soviet Union there were special reasons for Stalin’s victims to forget about the past. For one thing, nobody was sure whether Khrushchev’s thaw would last. It was possible that it would soon be followed by a return to repression; and, as it turned out, the thaw was brief and limited. Throughout the Khrushchev period, the regime made it clear that it was not prepared to tolerate any discussion of the Stalinist repressions that might lead to criticism of the Soviet system as a whole. Even at the height of the Khrushchev thaw in the early 1960s – a time when Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum, when Stalinist hardliners such as Kaganovich, Molotov and Malenkov were expelled from the Party, and when the perception of the Stalinist regime was changed for good by the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s searing Gulag tale One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) – there was no official recognition of the millions who had died or been repressed, no public monument, no government apology, no proper reparation for the victims, whose rehabilitation was granted only grudgingly.

  In 1964, Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, and the relatively liberal climate of the thaw came to an abrupt end. Censorship was tightened. Stalin’s reputation as a ‘great war leader’ was resurrected for the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet victory, when a bust of the dictator appeared by his grave near the Kremlin Wall. Brezhnev clamped down on the ‘dissidents’, who were first organized by the protest movement against the show trial of the samizdat writers Iulii Daniel and Andrei Siniavsky in February 1966. The persecution of the dissidents was a powerful deterrent against the discussion of Stalin’s crimes. Millions of people whose memory of the Stalinist regime might have made them think or speak more critically about the Soviet system pulled back, afraid of giving the impression that they sympathized with the dissidents, whose references to Stalin’s crimes were a form of opposition to the Brezhnevite regime. People again suppressed their memories – they refused to talk about the past – and conformed outwardly to the loyal and silent Soviet majority.

  Among Stalin’s former prisoners the threat of rearrest was real enough to reinforce this silence for several decades after 1956. The KGB may have been defanged by the ending of the Terror, but it still had access to a huge range of draconian punishments, and its powers of surveillance, which reached everywhere, instilled fear in anyone who dared to think or speak or act in ways that could be seen as anti-Soviet.

  Inna Gaister was working as an engineer in the Tsvetmetavtomatika Laboratories in Moscow in 1977 when she was called to the telephone to speak to an operative from the KGB who asked her to come in to the Lubianka. ‘Naturally, I began to get the shakes,’ recalls Inna. ‘I could not think at all.’ Her mind raced back to her arrest in April 1949, when she had been summoned in a similar manner in the midst of her thesis defence at Moscow University; to the arrest of her sister in June 1949; and to the arrest of both her parents forty years before, in 1937, when Inna had been twelve. Inna responded that she was in the middle of an experiment and so couldn’t come in straight away. The KGB official told her that he would ring again in half an hour. Inna frantically began to call her friends, both to warn them that they might be summoned too and to let them know where she was going, in case she did not return. When the KGB rang back, Inna once again refused to go to the Lubianka, so the operative began to question her about her acquaintance with Lev Kopelev, the former Gulag prisoner, dissident and writer, who was soon to be expelled from the Soviet Union. Kopelev was an acquaintance of Inna, as he was of hundreds of other Muscovites, and had given readings at her house. Somehow the KGB had found this out, perhaps by tapping her telephone, or more probably from an informant who had been at one of the readings. Inna was terrified. For the next few days, she lived in expectation of her imminent arrest. She threw out all the dissident literature she had been storing in her apartment, in case it was searched by the KGB, and cancelled any further readings in her home. Inna was not arrested. The incident had no further repercussions. But the call had stirred up painful memories and had left her with feelings of anxiety and fear that disturbed her for many years. ‘All my life I have struggled with this fear,’ reflects Inna, ‘I am always afraid.’ It is hard to say what frightens her. ‘It’s nothing concrete,’ she explains. ‘It’s more like a feeling of inferiority, of some vague defectiveness.’11

  This anxiety was widely shared by Stalin’s former prisoners. Zinaida Bushueva lived in constant worry and even expectation of her rearrest throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It was not until 1981, when she received a clean passport, without the mark to signify that she had been imprisoned in a labour camp, that her fear began to diminish, although even then, according to her daughter, she ‘was frightened all her life that the Terror might return, right until the day she died’. Maria Vitkevich, who spent ten years in the Norilsk labour camp after her arrest in 1945, remains frightened to this day. ‘I cannot rid myself of fear,’ she explains.

  I have felt it all my adult life, I feel it now [in 2004], and I will feel it on the day I die. Even now, I am afraid that there are people following me. I was rehabilitated fifty years ago. I have nothing to be ashamed of. The constitution says that they can’t interfere in my private life. But I am still afraid. I know that they have enough information about me to send me away again.

  Svetlana Bronshtein, who was sentenced to ten years in a labour camp in 1952, still has nightmares of the Viatka labour camps, where she served three years of her sentence before her release in 1955. If she could find the energy to do the paperwork and stand in the queues at the American Embassy, she would try to emigrate to the USA, where she believes her fear would disappear.12

  Cowed and silenced, the majority of Stalin’s victims stoically suppressed traumatic memories and emotions. ‘A human being survives by his ability to forget,’ wrote Varlam Shalamov in Kolyma Tales. People who had suffered terribly did not talk about their lives. They very rarely cried. ‘To this day I ca
nnot weep,’ reflects Inna Gaister. ‘In Stalin’s time people did not cry. Within me there has always been some sort of internal prohibition against crying which comes from that time.’13

  This stoicism has been widely noticed by historians. In her book on death and memory in Soviet Russia, the British historian Catherine Merridale notes that the Russians became so used to suppressing their emotions and remaining silent about their suffering – not so much in the sense of unconscious avoidance (‘denial’) but as a conscious strategy or coping mechanism – that one might wonder whether ‘notions of psychological trauma are genuinely irrelevant to Russian minds, as foreign as the imported machinery that seizes up and fails in a Siberian winter’.14

  Psychiatry suggests that talking has a therapeutic influence on the victims of trauma, whereas the repression of emotions perpetuates the trauma, the anger and the fear.15 The longer the silence continues the more these victims are likely to feel trapped and overwhelmed by their unspoken memories. Stoicism may help people to survive but it can also make them passive and accepting of their fate. It was Stalin’s lasting achievement to create a whole society in which stoicism and passivity were social norms.

  Nobody is more stoical or accepting of his fate than Nikolai Lileyev. Born in 1921, Nikolai was conscripted by the Red Army at the age of eighteen, captured by the Germans in 1941 and taken as a POW to work on a farm in Estonia, and then in various mines and factories in Germany. In 1945, Nikolai returned to the Soviet Union, where he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in the Komi labour camps. On his release in 1955, Nikolai was not allowed to return to his native Leningrad, so he lived in Luga until 1964. In 2002, he wrote his memoirs, ‘The Unlucky Do Not Live’, which begins with this prologue, written, he insists, without the slightest hint of irony or black humour:

  I have always been extremely fortunate, particularly in the difficult periods of my life. I am lucky that my father was not arrested; that the teachers at my school were good; that I did not fight in the Finnish War; that I was never hit by a bullet; that the hardest year of my captivity I spent in Estonia; that I did not die working in the mines in Germany; that I was not shot for desertion when I was arrested by the Soviet authorities; that I was not tortured when I was interrogated; that I did not die on the convoy to the labour camp, though I weighed only 48 kilograms and was 1.8 metres tall; that I was in a Soviet labour camp when the horrors of the Gulag were already in decline. I am not bitter from my experience and have learned to accept life as it really is.16

  2

  In 1956, Simonov divorced the actress Valentina Serova and married his fourth wife, Larisa Zhadova, who was then pregnant with his child. Larisa was an art historian, the daughter of a senior general, the Second-in-Command of all Soviet Ground Forces. Her father had been furious when she married her first husband, the poet Semyon Gudzenko, who died in 1953; when she announced that she would marry Simonov, he threatened to expel her and her three-year-old daughter from the family house (‘Isn’t one poet enough?’). Larisa was a serious and rather stern woman, cold by comparison with Valentina. She took charge of Simonov’s private life and became his close companion, but she did not inspire him to write romantic poetry.17 Perhaps he wanted order and quiet in his life.

  The break-up with Valentina had been as turbulent as the rest of Simonov’s relationship with her. Things began to fall apart after the birth of their daughter Masha (Maria) in 1950. Valentina, who had always been a heavy drinker, became a chronic alcoholic as her beauty faded and her career in the theatre steadily declined. There was a series of scandalous affairs at the Maly Theatre, for which she was reprimanded several times and then dismissed by the authorities in 1952. Valentina’s behaviour was a huge embarrassment for Simonov, who at the time was under growing pressure from the Stalinist hardliners in the campaign against the Jews. Simonov had constant fights with Valentina, whose drinking bouts and violent fits grew worse as she sensed that he was preparing to leave her. In 1954, he moved out of their apartment on Gorky Street. He was already seeing Larisa, as Valentina was aware. In a last effort to rescue their relationship, he got Valentina the leading role in a play at the Moscow Soviet Theatre, and promised that he would return to her if she ‘pulled herself together’. But Valentina, as he must have known, was incapable of doing that. She was sick and needed help.

  Simonov and Valentina Serova, 1955

  In the spring of 1956, Simonov finally decided to divorce Valentina: Larisa had told him that she was pregnant, and he could not risk another scandal, if he refused to marry her. Valentina did not want a divorce. Like many of the couple’s friends, she took the view that her husband was abandoning her just when she most needed his support. Perhaps this was unfair. There was little understanding of alcoholism in the Soviet Union, where heavy drinking was commonly regarded as a part of the Russian national character, and without medical support there was not much Simonov could do for her. Valentina fell into despair and drank so heavily that she ended up in hospital. Just then the divorce was legalized. Valentina had a nervous breakdown. She was confined to a psychiatric hospital five times over the course of the next four years. Masha lived with Valentina’s mother for most of this period. The girl was profoundly disturbed by the strains of living with her alcoholic mother and by the disappearance of her father.18

  In 1960, Dr Zinaida Sinkevich, the main consulting psychiatrist in the hospital where Valentina was confined, wrote to Simonov, accusing him of having caused Valentina’s breakdown:

  Valentina Vasilevna gave herself to you entirely… There was no aspect of her life that was not in your hands – her self-esteem as a woman, her career as an actress in the theatre and the cinema, her success and fame, her family and friends, her children, her material well-being… And then you left, and your departure destroyed everything! She lost all confidence, her ties to the theatre and the cinema, her friends and family, her self-esteem… Wine was all she had left, the one thing on which she could rely, but without you it became an escape from reality.

  Looking back on these events in 1969, Simonov confessed in a letter to Katia (Larisa’s sixteen-year-old daughter from her first marriage who had lived with Simonov since 1956) that by the time of his divorce from Valentina he had felt ‘not a shred of respect, let alone of friendship’ for his alcoholic wife, and that his ‘one regret’, for which he blamed himself, was that he had not left her ‘many years before’.19

  Simonov had always had this cold and rational capacity to cut people out of his life if he disapproved of them or calculated that they were of little use to him. In the 1930s and 1940s, when political loyalties were considered higher than personal ones, Simonov had broken off many relationships, and for that reason he was left without close friends when his manoeuvring came back to haunt him after 1956. Perhaps it goes to show that in the end it is impossible to be a Stalinist in public life and not let the morals of the system infect personal relationships.

  After the divorce, Simonov made a conscious effort to cut out of his life everything to do with Valentina, although he continued to help her financially until her death in 1975. He bought a new apartment and dacha. He excluded their daughter Masha from the rest of his family, not inviting her to birthday celebrations, family anniversaries, book or film parties. In his 1969 letter to Katia, who had demanded to know why she had not been allowed to meet Masha, Simonov explained why it was for the best for them to be kept apart.*

  Today there is a nineteen-year-old girl [Masha] who has been brought up by her mother with very different views and rules to my own – and therefore, although she carries my name, she is spiritually alien to me. I don’t consider her part of my life, even though for many years I devoted much time and energy to ensuring that she have a more or less normal existence, an almost impossible task since she was living with her mother, who for more than twenty years had drunk, then cured herself, then drunk and cured herself again.

  I have never wanted you to know or meet this girl or to have any relations with he
r, because it would have made her and you unhappy. And I don’t think there’s a reason why you should know her now. Neither of you needs that. In life there are difficult decisions to be made, times when a man must take responsibility and do what he believes to be right, without asking others to carry the burden.20

  It was only in the 1970s that Simonov softened in his attitude towards Masha, who then appeared at family events.

  For Simonov the marriage to Larisa and the birth of their daughter Aleksandra meant the start of a new life. ‘As for your sister, she is eight weeks old today,’ Simonov wrote to his son Aleksei in March 1957.

  She is losing her dark colouring and slowly turning red – so there is hope: that she will be a strong person, with healthy views on life, that she will walk and eat and talk as a person should – in a word, that she will become someone with good principles.

  Domestic happiness coincided with the Khrushchev thaw. For Simonov the changes of 1956 represented a spiritual release, even though at first he had his reservations about the rejection of Stalin. After 1956, recalls Aleksei,

  my father became happier and more relaxed. He was not so overburdened and pressured by his work. His hands, which had suffered from a nervous condition for as long as I remembered as a child, became normal once again. He became more attentive and warmer towards people close to him. It was as if the thaw in politics had thawed out his heart, and he began to live again.21