The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  It was during one of these last spells in hospital that Simonov dictated his memoirs, Through the Eyes of a Person of My Generation, which remained unfinished at his death.44 Simonov constructed his memoirs as another conversation with his former selves, recognizing that it was impossible to know what he had really thought at any moment in the past, but searching for the truth about his life through this dialogue with his own memory. Struggling to explain his long preoccupation with Stalin, his collaboration with the regime and the nature of the Stalinism that had taken possession of him, he interrogated himself without flinching – and judged himself harshly.

  Simonov died on 28 August 1979. His ashes were scattered on a former battlefield near Mogilyov, the resting place of several thousand men who had fallen in the battles of June 1941. The press around the world announced the death of a great Soviet writer, ‘Stalin’s favourite’. During the 1980s, Simonov’s works continued to be read as classics in Soviet schools and universities. They were translated into many languages. But after the collapse of the Soviet regime, his literary reputation fell and his sales declined dramatically. To younger Russian readers, who wanted something new, his prose seemed dated and too ‘Soviet’.

  3

  After 1956, millions of people who had collaborated in some way in Stalin’s crimes, some directly as NKVD men or prison guards, others indirectly as bureaucrats, went on living ‘normal’ lives. Most of them were able to avoid any sense of guilt by contriving, consciously or not, to forget their actions in the past, by rationalizing and defending their behaviour through ideology or some other justifying myth, or by pleading innocence on the basis that they ‘did not know’ or were ‘only carrying out orders’.45 Few had the courage to confront their guilt with the honesty displayed by Simonov.

  By most estimates, there were something in the region of a million former camp guards living in the Soviet Union after 1956. Few of those who talked about their past showed much sign of contrition or remorse. Lev Razgon recalls meeting a Siberian Tatar named Niiazov in a Moscow hospital in the 1970s. Niiazov turned out to be a former guard at the Bikin transit camp near Khabarovsk, where he had overseen the execution of thousands of prisoners. His story was simple. The son of a janitor, Niiazov had been the bully at his school and had become a petty thief and gangster by the time he was a teenager. Picked up by the police, he was first employed as a prison guard in Omsk and then transferred to the Gulag as a guard. The Bikin transit camp between Khabarovsk and Vladivostok was one of many ‘special installations’ (spetsob’ekty) in the Gulag system where prisoners were held for a few days before being shot. Niiazov was involved in a large proportion of the estimated 15,000 to 18,000 shootings carried out in the Bikin camp during its brief existence from 1937 to 1940. He was given vodka before and after the shootings. He felt no regret, according to Razgon, nor any guilt when he was told many years later that his victims had been innocent.

  Niiazov told Razgon that he slept well. During the war, Niiazov was mobilized by the Red Army. He fought in Germany, where he took part in the looting of a bank. After 1945, Niiazov was put in charge of security at a military warehouse; he grew rich from thefts and scams. Sacked from his job by a new Party boss, he had a heart attack and was brought to the hospital where he met Razgon.46

  Ivan Korchagin was a guard at the ALZhIR Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. The son of a poor peasant, he had only four years of rural schooling and could not read or write when he joined the army at the age of sixteen in 1941. After the war he was part of a military unit mobilized for various tasks in the Gulag. Korchagin was employed as a camp guard at ALZhIR from 1946 to 1954. Interviewed in 1988, he was aware that the mass arrests which filled the labour camps had been unjust, but he felt no contrition for his actions. He rationalized and justified his participation in the system of repression through his own brand of half-baked ideology, moral lessons drawn from life and class hatred for his prisoners:

  What is Soviet power, I ask you? It is an organ of coercion! Understand? Say, for example, we are sitting here and talking, and two policemen knock at the door: ‘Come with us!’ they say. And that’s that! That’s Soviet power! They can take you away and put you in prison – for nothing. And whether you’re an enemy or not, you won’t persuade anybody of your innocence. That’s how it is. I get orders to guard prisoners. Should I believe these orders or should I believe you? Maybe I feel sorry for you, maybe I don’t, but what can I do? When you kill a pig you don’t feel sorry for it when it squeals. And even if I did feel sorry for somebody, how could I help them? When we were retreating from the front in the war, we had to abandon wounded soldiers, knowing they would die. We felt sorry, but what could we do? In the camp I guarded mothers with sick children. They cried and cried. But what could I do? They were being punished for their husbands. But that was not my business. I had my work to do. They say that a son does not answer for his father, but a mother answers for her husband. And if that husband is an enemy of the people, then what sort of son could the mother be raising? There were lots of children in the camp. But what could I do? It was bad for them. But maybe they were better off without mothers like that. Those enemies were really parasites. They had trips abroad. They were always showing off, with their music and their dachas and their finery. And the poor people were hungry, they had no fat, they lived worse than animals. So who’s the enemy of the people? Why should I cry for anyone? Besides, my job did no one any harm. I did a service for the government.47

  Ivan Korchagin, Karaganda, 1988

  During the period of glasnost in the late 1980s, when the role of the Gulag administrators began to be debated in the public media, many former guards wrote letters to ex-prisoners asking them to confirm for the historical record that they had been kind and decent to them in the camp. One such guard was Mikhail Iusipenko. Iusipenko was born in 1905 to the family of a landless labourer in Akmolinsk. He had only three years of rural schooling before the outbreak of the First World War and the departure of his father for the army forced him to go out to work. His father never returned from the war. During the 1920s, Iusipenko worked as a farm hand to support his mother and his younger brothers and sisters. He lost his wife and their two children in the famine of 1931. From 1934, Iusipenko was a Party worker in Karaganda, the administrative centre of the Gulag camps in Kazakhstan. He was soon recruited by the NKVD, which appointed him the Deputy Commandant of the ALZhIR labour camp near Akmolinsk. During his five years at the camp, from 1939 to 1944, Iusipenko allegedly raped a large number of the female prisoners, but there was no criminal investigation of his activities, only lots of rumours, which, it seems, began to trouble Iusipenko in the years of the Khrushchev thaw. Between 1961 and 1988, Iusipenko wrote to several hundred former prisoners, including many children of the women who had died since their release from ALZhIR, asking them to write a testimonial about his good conduct. He received testimonials from twenty-two of these women, who wrote to say that

  Mikhail Iusipenko, Karaganda, 1988

  they remembered him as a kind and decent man, certainly compared to many of the other guards at the ALZhIR labour camp (several of these testimonials were written by women who were said to be among his rape victims). In 1988, after an article about the ALZhIR camp in the newspaper Leninskaia smena implied that he was guilty of sexually assaulting prisoners, Iusipenko forwarded these testimonials to the editors of various national and local newspapers, as well as to the Party offices of Kazakhstan, with a long commentary intended to ‘put the historical record straight’. Iusipenko claimed that he had ‘always known’ that the prisoners were innocent and that ‘from the start’ he had ‘shown them profound sympathy’, had ‘never talked to them in a commanding tone’, and had done ‘everything possible to ease their burden’, allowing them to write and receive more letters and parcels than officially allowed, and filing reports to get them released early, at ‘great risk’ to his position and even to his life. ‘I could easily have been accused of sympathizing with the
enemies of the people,’ Iusipenko wrote, ‘and then it would have been the end for me. But I was convinced, as I am now, that I was doing the right thing.’ By getting the newspapers to publish the testimonials with his commentary, Iusipenko aimed not just to demonstrate that he had a clear conscience. He intended to show that he had even been opposed to the ‘Stalinist repressions’ (a phrase coined in the era of glasnost) and, indeed, that he had been a victim of them too.48

  Many former Gulag officials invented similar myths about their past. Pavel Drozdov, Chief Accountant of the Planning Section and Inspector of the Dalstroi Gulag complex, was arrested in 1938 and later sentenced to fifteen years in the labour camps of Magadan. After his release in 1951, he remained in Magadan as a voluntary worker, and was soon joined by his wife and son. According to the story Pavel told his son, the former Gulag chief had been nothing but a humble specialist with no real authority in the Dalstroi Trust, which managed the camps. The tale had an element of truth in so far as, after the arrest of his patron Eduard Berzin, the head of the Dalstroi Trust, in 1937, Pavel had been demoted to the rank of simple accountant – his own arrest following shortly thereafter. Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, Pavel began to carry out research for his memoirs of the Dalstroi Trust. His aim was to honour Berzin’s memory by presenting him as a visionary economic reformer and as a humane and enlightened man. But some of Pavel’s correspondence with former Dalstroi prisoners disturbed him deeply. He had not realized, or had somehow banished from his mind, the full extent of the human suffering over which he had presided in the Planning Section of the Dalstroi Trust. Pavel had a series of heart attacks. On medical advice, he gave up writing his memoirs. The truth about his past was too upsetting to confront. Pavel died in 1967. His son continues to believe that his father was a blameless bureaucrat, a mere accountant in the Dalstroi Gulag complex at a time when Berzin ran it ‘in a relatively humane and progressive way’, who fell victim to the Stalinist regime.49

  The intermingling of myth and memory sustains every family, but it played a special role in the Soviet Union, where millions of lives were torn apart. Psychoanalysis suggests that trauma victims can benefit from placing their experiences in the context of a broader narrative, which gives them meaning and purpose. Unlike the victims of the Nazi war against the Jews, for whom there could be no redeeming narrative, the victims of Stalinist repression had two main collective narratives in which to place their own life-stories and find some sort of meaning for their ordeals: the survival narrative, as told in the memoir literature of former Gulag prisoners, in which their suffering was transcended by the human spirit of the survivor; and the Soviet narrative, in which that suffering was redeemed by the Communist ideal, the winning of the Great Patriotic War, or the achievements of the Soviet Union.

  The Gulag memoirs published in the decades after Khrushchev’s thaw have had a powerful impact on the way that ordinary people remember their own family history in the Stalin period. Their influence has rested partly on the way that trauma victims deal with their own memories. As psychoanalysts have shown, people with traumatic memories tend to block out parts of their own past. Their memory becomes fragmentary, organized by a series of disjointed episodes (such as the arrest of a parent or the moment of eviction from their home) rather than by a linear chronology. When they try to reconstruct the story of their life, particularly when their powers of recall are weakened by old age, such people tend to make up for the gaps in their own memory by drawing on what they have read, or what they have heard from others with experiences similar to theirs.50 In the opening pages of his memoirs, written in the 1970s, Alexander Dolgun, a US consul clerk arrested for ‘espionage’ in 1948 and imprisoned in a labour camp in Kazakhstan, explained these lapses in his memory:

  Most of my story is what I actually remember, but some is what must have been. There are episodes and faces and words and sensations burned so deeply into my memory that no amount of time will wear them away. There are other times when I was so exhausted because they never let me sleep or so starved or beaten or burning with fever or drugged with cold that everything was blurred, and now I can only put together what must have happened by setting out to build a connection across these periods.

  Although he claimed to have an ‘extremely good memory’, Dolgun had ‘absolutely no recall’ of a two-week period between leaving Moscow on a convict train and starting work in a stone quarry in the camp in Kazakhstan.51

  To fill these gaps people borrowed from each other’s memories. Many of the scenes described by amateur memorists of the Stalin period bear a striking resemblance to scenes in well-known books about the Terror such as Yevgeniia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind (1967) or Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973). Though both of these books, originally published in the West, did not officially come out in Russia until the late 1980s, they circulated widely through samizdat long before, helping to give rise to a boom in amateur memoir-writing from that time.* It is not clear if the scenes that figure in these memoirs represent a direct memory, as opposed to what the writer surmises took place or imagines ‘must have happened’, because others wrote about such episodes. Irina Sherbakova, who interviewed many Gulag survivors in the 1980s, suggests how this borrowing of memories occurred:

  Over many decades, life in the Gulag gave birth to endless rumours, legends, and myths, the most common being about famous people – long believed to have been executed in Moscow – who were said to have been seen by someone in some far distant camp somewhere. There were constantly recurring themes and details in such stories. For example, at least four women described to me exactly the same scene: how, many years later, when they were able to look in a mirror again and see themselves, the first image they saw was the face of their own mother. As early as the 1970s, I recognized incidents recounted to me orally that exactly matched scenes described in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or in other printed recollections. By now [in 1992] story-telling about the camps has become so general that recording oral memory has become much more difficult. The vast amount of information pouring out of people often seems to happen through an immolation of their own memories to the point where it begins to seem as if everything they know happened to them personally.52

  Many Gulag survivors insist that they witnessed scenes described in books by Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov, that they recognize the guards or NKVD interrogators mentioned in these works, or even that they knew the writers in the camps, when documentation clearly shows that this could not be so.53

  There are a number of reasons why Gulag survivors borrowed published recollections in this way. In the 1970s and 1980s, when books like The Gulag Archipelago circulated in samizdat, many victims of Stalinist repression identified so strongly with their ideological position, which they took to be the key to understanding the truth about the camps, that they suspended their own independent memories and allowed these books to speak for them. The victims of repression frequently lacked a clear conceptual grasp of their own experience, having no structural framework or understanding of the political context in which to make sense of their memories. This gap reinforced their inclination to substitute these writers’ coherent and clear memories for their own confused and fragmentary recollections. As one historian has observed from the experience of interviewing survivors of the Great Terror:

  Should you ask the seemingly straightforward question ‘How many people did you know who were arrested in 1937?’, the response would probably be one of wide-eyed amazement, ‘Haven’t you read Solzhenitsyn? Don’t you know that everyone was arrested?’ If you continue with: ‘But were any members of your family arrested?’, there may well be a pause… ‘Well, no, not in my family, but everybody else was.’ Then you ask: ‘How many people were arrested in the communal apartment you lived in?’ There’s a very long pause, followed by, ‘Well, hmm, I don’t really remember, but yes, yes there was one, Ivanov, who lived in the room down at the end, yes, now I remember.’54

  This example shows
why oral testimonies, on the whole, are more reliable than literary memoirs, which have usually been seen as a more authentic record of the past. Like all memory, the testimony given in an interview is unreliable, but, unlike a book, it can be cross-examined and tested against other evidence to disentangle true memories from received or imagined ones.

  The published Gulag memoirs influenced not only the recollection of scenes and people, but the very understanding of the experience. All the memoirs of the Stalin Terror are reconstructed narratives by survivors.55 The story they tell is usually one of purgatory and redemption – a journey through the ‘hell’ of the Gulag and back again to ‘normal life’ – in which the narrator transcends death and suffering. This uplifting moral helps to account for the compelling influence of these literary memoirs on the way that other Gulag survivors recalled their own stories. Ginzburg’s memoirs, in particular, became a model of the survivor narrative and her literary structure was copied by countless amateur memoirists with life-stories not unlike her own. The unifying theme of Ginzburg’s memoirs is regeneration through love – a theme which gives her writing powerful effect as a work of literature. Ginzburg explains her survival in the camps as a matter of her faith in human beings; the flashes of humanity she evokes in others, and which help her to survive, are a response to her faith in people. In the first part of her memoirs, Into the Whirlwind, Ginzburg highlights her work in a nursery at Kolyma where caring for the children reminds her of her son and gives her the strength to go on. In the second part, Within the Whirlwind (1981), Ginzburg is transferred from the nursery to a hospital, where she falls in love with a fellow prisoner serving as a doctor in the camp. Despite the anguish of repeated separations, they both survive and somehow keep in touch until Stalin’s death; freed but still in exile from the major Russian cities, they get married and adopt a child.56 This narrative trajectory is endlessly repeated in the memoir literature. The uniformity of such ‘family chronicles’ and ‘documentary tales’, which are virtually identical in their basic structure, in their form and moral tone, is remarkable and cannot be explained by literary fashion on its own. Perhaps these memoirists, who all lived such extraordinary lives, felt some need to link their destiny to that of others like themselves by recalling their life-story according to a literary prototype.