The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  I am deeply grateful to all the families who contributed to the project with Memorial. It is impractical to thank them individually (they are all named in the List of Interviews) but special thanks must go to Antonina Znamenskaia, Inna Shikheyeva, Marksena Nikiforova, Elizaveta Delibash, Angelina Bushueva, Valentina Tikhanova, Nina Feofilaktova, Maria Vitkevich, Marianna Barkovskaia, Georgii Fursei, Maria Kuznetsova, Yevgeniia Vasileva, Nikolai Kovach, Valentin Muravsky, Rada Poloz, Anzhelika Sirman, Zoia Timofeyeva, Nikolai Lileyev, Vladimir Piatnitsky, Lev Netto, Julia Volkova, Larisa and Vitalii Garmash, Maia Rodak, Galina Adasinskaia, Roza Novoseltseva, Veronika Nevskaia, Svetlana Khlystova, Vera Minusova, Nikolai Meshalkin, Elfrida Meshalkina, Leonid Saltykov, Dmitry Streletsky, Irina Mikueva, Rezeda Taisina, Liubov Tetiueva, Vera Vasiltseva, Natalia Stepantseva, Ivan Uglitskikh, Sofia Ozemblovskaia, Valentina Kropotina, Tamara Trubina and Vera Turkina, who all gave many hours of their time and precious documents to the project. I would also like to thank Elena Bonner, who was interviewed as part of the Memorial project by Irina Flige in Boston, for giving me permission to cite extracts from Antonina W. Bouis’s translation of her book Mothers and Daughters (London: Hutchinson, 1992).

  These people are the heroes of Whisperers. In a real sense this is their book: I have only given voice to them. For us these are stories, for them it is their lives.

  At every stage of working on this book, I have been acutely conscious of my duty as a historian to tell these people’s stories in a way that they can recognize as a truthful reflection of their experience. There is no anonymous testimony in this book: with one or two exceptions, all the people who have given interviews or documents have agreed to have their names revealed. For this reason, sections of the later drafts were translated into Russian and given to the families concerned, so that they could make the necessary corrections and suggest alterations to the text. This was a long and complex process – not least because the way a person sees his own biography is often very different from the view of him that can be formed from a reading of his memoirs, letters, diaries and recorded words – but it was important that the subjects of this book should have a chance to correct it. There was no case where I was forced to change my overall interpretation, but many where my views were enriched and improved by the family’s input. A problem arose with just one family, the Shikheyevs (Gaisters): some members of the family took exception to the testimony of Inna’s older daughter, which was cut from the proofs on their request. Inna saw and corrected all the remaining Gaister passages but later closed her archive in Memorial. I would like to thank Zhanna Bogdanovich and Natalia Leshchenko for translating sections of the book into Russian; Irina Flige, Alyona Kozlova and Irina Ostrovskaia for checking the final drafts; Leo Viprinski for his generous and thoughtful assistance with the Slavin sections; and Aleksei Simonov, not just for correcting the English text on the Laskins and the Simonovs, but for showing me the need to think again about the enigma of ‘K.M.’

  Most of the materials generated by the research project of The Whisperers are available on line (http://www.orlandofiges.com). Here you will find the main family archives together with the transcripts and sound extracts of the interviews. Some of the materials have been translated into English. Without the website, many of these archives would have been lost when their owners passed away, for the younger generation in Russia has little interest in the Soviet past and not much storage space to keep such things. I would like to thank Emma Beer, Aibek Baratov and Ding Zhang for their help in the design and construction of the website. With the support of Jerry Kuehl, Emma also took the lead in trying to get interest going in a video project, the aim of which was to create a film archive of interviews with the heroes of The Whisperers delivered via streaming from the website.

  Working on this project has involved a lot of travelling, months spent away from my family, Stephanie, Lydia and Alice, who have put up with a lot but will now see, I hope, that it was worthwhile. Through their love and support they have reminded me of the meaning of a family.

  I must thank my friend Robert (Lord) Skidelsky for his generous hospitality in Moscow, and Aleksei Iurasovsky for being such a good landlord. I would also like to thank Elena (Helen) Volkonskaia for inviting me to stay in her lovely home in Tuscany, where much of the second draft was written in the summer of 2006.

  As a writer, I am blessed with wonderful support. My agent Deborah Rogers has been as kind and passionate as ever in her efforts on my behalf, and Melanie Jackson, in the United States, has also helped in many ways. Simon Winder at Penguin and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan are a dream editorial team for any writer. In their different ways – Simon inspiring with enthusiastic comments and encouragement, Sara editing the typescript line by line with extraordinary passion and attention to detail – they have each had an immense influence on the writing of this book. I owe a huge debt to them both. I would also like to thank David Watson for his copy-editing, Merle Read for checking the transliteration of the Russian names, Alan Gilliland for drawing the floorplans and Donald Winchester for extra editorial support. I am also grateful to Andrei Bobrov at the ITAR-TASS Photo Agency for helping to track down some elusive photographs.

  I would like to thank the scholars who have helped me with points of detail and directed me to sources that I did not know: Valerii Golofast, Katerina Gerasimova, Stephen Wheatcroft, Catriona Kelly, Boris Kolonitsky, Jonathan Haslam, Daniel Beer and Daniel Pick. I also owe a debt to Rob Perks, who shared his wisdom on the challenges of oral history. Jennifer Davis gave me good advice on the legal aspects of the contracts with Memorial, for which many thanks. Raj Chandarvarkar gave loyal support and help in countless ways. I only wish he was alive to discuss the book with me.

  Finally, I would like to thank my old friend and colleague, Hiroaki Kuromiya, one of the finest and most careful historians of the Stalin period, who read the manuscript with strict instructions to challenge anything that could be construed as a flaw. Any errors that remain are mine.

  London

  April 2007

  Permissions

  With the following exceptions (listed by the pages on which they appear), all the photographs are reproduced with the permission of their owners from private family archives and the archives of Memorial (MM, MP, MSP): GARF: 21; GMPIR: 330; RGAE: 23, 225, 226; RGALI: 2, 61, 135, 140, 199, 403, 407, 409, 495, 507, 617; TASS: 229, 232, 375, 500; TsGAKFD: 152, 486, 504, 524, 527, 609, 627.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 2, l. 31; d. 3, ll. 18–19.

  2. I have based my estimate on the figures in M. Ellman, ‘Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 54, no. 7 (November 2002), pp. 1151–72. Ellman gives a figure of 18.75 million Gulag sentences between 1934 and 1953, but many Gulag prisoners served more than one sentence in this period. He also gives the following figures for these years: at least 1 million executions; 2 million people in the labour army and other units of forced labour subordinated to the Gulag; 5 million people among the deported nationalities. According to the most reliable estimates, about 10 million people were repressed as ‘kulaks’ after 1928. That gives a total of 36.5 million people; allowing for the duplication of Gulag sentences, an overall figure of 25 million people is reasonable and probably an underestimate.

  3. Interview with Elena Dombrovskaia, Moscow, January 2003.

  4. MP, f. 4, op. 25, d. 2, ll. 9–10.

  5. M. Gefter, ‘V predchuvstvii proshlogo’, Vek XX i mir, 1990, no. 9, p. 29.

  6. See e.g. V. Kaverin, Epilog: Memuary (Moscow, 1989); K. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia (Moscow, 1990).

  7. The literature is enormous, but see e.g. A. Barmine, One Who Survived (New York, 1945); V. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (London, 1947); A. Gorbatov, Years off My Life (London, 1964); N. Kaminskaya, Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defence Attorney (New York, 1982); N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (London, 1989); same author,
Hope Abandoned (London, 1990); E. Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York, 1967); same author, Within the Whirlwind (New York, 1981); L. Bogoraz, ‘Iz vospominanii’, Minuvshee, vol. 2 (Paris, 1986); L. Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London, 1979); same author, The Education of a True Believer (London, 1980); T. Aksakova-Sivers, Semeinaia khronika, 2 vols. (Paris, 1988); Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror (New Jersey, 1995).

  8. A. Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 119–46.

  9. Again the literature is voluminous, but among the more interesting are: O. Adamova-Sliuzberg, Put’ (Moscow, 1993); A. Raikin, Vospominaniia (St Petersburg, 1993); I. Diakonov, Kniga vospominanii (St Petersburg, 1995); Iu. Liuba, Vospominaniia (St Petersburg, 1998); I. Shikheeva-Gaister, Semeinaia khronika vremen kul’ta lichnosti (1925–53 gg.) (Moscow, 1998); I. Dudareva, Proshloe vsegda s nami: vospominaniia (St Petersburg, 1998); E. Evangulova, Krestnyi put’ (St Petersburg, 2000); K. Atarova, Vcherashnyi den’: vokrug sem’i Atarovykh-Dal’tsevykh: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2001); L. El’iashova, My ukhodim, my ostaemsia. Kniga 1: Dedy, ottsy (St Petersburg, 2001); N. Iudkovskii, Rekviem dvum semeistvam: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2002); E. Vlasova, Domashnyi al’bom: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2002); P. Kodzaev, Vospominaniia reabilitirovannogo spetspereselentsa (Vladikavkaz, 2002); E. Liusin, Pis’mo-vospominaniia o prozhitykh godakh (Kaluga, 2002); A. Bovin, XXvek kak zhizn’: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2003). See also: I. Paperno, ‘Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 3, no. 4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 577–610.

  10.See e.g. S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York, 1994); S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997); S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1997).

  11. See e.g., N. Kosterina, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1964); O. Berggol’ts, ‘Bezumstvo predannosti: iz dnevnikov Ol’gi Berggol’ts’, Vremia i my, 1980, no. 57, pp. 270–85; A. Mar’ian, Gody moi, kak soldaty: dnevnik sel’skogo aktivista, 1925–1953 gg. (Kishinev, 1987); M. Prishvin, Dnevniki (Moscow, 1990); E. Bulgakova, Dnevnik Eleny Bulgakovoi (Moscow, 1990); N. Vishniakova, Dnevnik Niny Vishniakovoi (Sverdlovsk, 1990).

  12. See e.g. V. Vernadskii, ‘Dnevnik 1938 goda’, Druzhba narodov, 1992, no. 2, pp. 219–39; no. 3, pp. 241–69; same author, ‘Dnevnik 1939 goda’, Druzhba narodov, 1993, nos. 11/12, pp. 3–41; A. Solov’ev, Tetradi krasnogo professora (1912–1941 gg.), Neizvestnaia Rossiia. XX vek, vol. 4 (Moscow, 1993), pp. 140–228; “‘Ischez chelovek i net ego, kuda devalsia – nikto ne znaet”: iz konfiskovannogo dnevnika’, Istochnik, 1993, no. 4, pp. 46–62; Golgofa. Po materialam arkhivno-sledstvennogo dela no. 603 na Sokolovu-Piatnitskuiu Iu. I., ed. V. I. Piatnitskii (St Petersburg, 1993); A. Afinogenov, ‘Dnevnik 1937 goda’, Sovremennaia dramaturgiia, 1993, no. 1, pp. 219–33; no. 2, pp. 223–41; no. 3, pp. 217–39; K. Chukovskii, Dnevnik 1930–1969 (Moscow, 1994); M. Prishvin, ‘“Zhizn’ stala veselei…”: iz dnevnika 1936 goda’, Oktiabr’, 1993, no. 10, pp. 3–21; same author, ‘Dnevnik 1937 goda’, Oktiabr’, 1994, no. 11, pp. 144–71; 1995, no. 9, pp. 155–71; M. Prishvin and V. Prishvin, My s toboi: dnevnik liubvi (Moscow, 1996); A. Kopenin, ‘Zapiski nesumashedshego: iz dnevnika sel’skogo uchitelia’, Rodina, 1996, no. 2, pp. 17–29; Dnevnye zapiski ust’-kulomskogo krest’ianina I. S. Rassukhaeva (1902–1953) (Moscow, 1997); M. Krotova, Bavykinskii dnevnik: vospominaniia shkol’nogo pedagoga (Moscow, 1998); A. Tsember, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1997); V. Sitnikov, Perezhitoe: dnevnik saratovskogo obyvatelia 1918–1931 gg. (Moscow, 1999); E. Filipovich, Ot sovetskoi pionerki do cheloveka-pensionerki: moi dnevniki (Podol’sk, 2000); A. Man’kov, Dnevniki tridtsatykh godov (St Petersburg, 2001); Iu. Nagibin, Dnevnik (Moscow, 2001); N. Lugovskaya, I Want to Live: The Diary of a Soviet Schoolgirl 1932–1937 (Moscow, 2003); M. Shirshova, Zabytyi dnevnik poliarnogo biologa (Moscow, 2003). Extracts from ten diaries were published in translation in V. Garros, N. Korenevskaya and T. Lahusen (eds.), Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1995).

  13. The historian Jochen Hellbeck has pioneered the study of Soviet diaries in the 1930s, particularly the diary of Stepan Podlubny, which is reproduced in J. Hellbeck (ed.), Tagebuch aus Moskau, 1931–1939 (Munich, 1996). See also Hellbeck’s discussion of four Soviet diaries from the 1930s in Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). Hellbeck’s controversial view is that Soviet citizens in the 1930s thought in Soviet categories because they had no conceptual alternative, and that in their diaries they tried to mould themselves into the New Soviet Person by purging from themselves all non-Soviet elements of their personality (which they experienced as a ‘crisis of the self’). See further: J. Hellbeck, ‘Self-Realization in the Stalinist System: Two Soviet Diaries of the 1930s’, in M. Hildermeier (ed.), Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: neue Wege der Forschung (Munich, 1998), pp. 275–90. Hellbeck’s view has been heavily criticized, particularly by A. Etkind, ‘Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation?’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 171–86; and S. Boym in ‘Analiz praktiki sub’ektivizatsii v rannestalinskom obshchestve’, Ab Imperio, 2002, no. 3, pp. 209–418.

  14. See e.g. J. Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939)’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44 (1996), pp. 344–73; I.Halfin and J. Hellbeck, ‘Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s “Magnetic Mountain” and the State of Soviet Historical Studies’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44 (1996), pp. 456–63; I. Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); C. Kaier and E. Naiman (eds.),Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Bloomington, 2006).

  15. This is the main argument of Hellbeck (see the references to his work above).

  16. MP, f. 4, op. 18, d. 2, ll. 49–50.

  17. See in particular the two books by Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia (London, 2000) and Ivan’s War: The Red Army 1939–1945 (London, 2005), both partly based on interviews.

  18. See e.g. Golos krest’ian: Sel’skaia Rossiia XX veka v krest’ianskikh memuarakh (Moscow, 1996); Sud’ba liudei: Rossiia xx vek. Biografii semei kak ob’ekt sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia (Moscow, 1996); D. Bertaux, P. Thompson and A. Rotkirch (eds.), On Living through Soviet Russia (London, 2004); V. Skultans, The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (London, 1998); A. Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington, 2006). Many books have drawn from interviews, among them notably: N. Adler, Beyond the Soviet System: The Gulag Survivor (New Brunswick, 2002); A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (London, 2003).

  19. The first major oral history was the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (329 interviews with Soviet refugees in Europe and the USA carried out in 1950–51). Most of the interviewees had left the Soviet Union between 1943 and 1946, and their views, which were coloured by the experience of living in the West, were consciously anti-Soviet in a way that was not representative of the Soviet population as a whole. Nonetheless, the project resulted in the publication of several sociological books, which influenced the Western view of Soviet daily life during the Cold War: R. Bauer, A. Inkeles and C. Klukhohn, How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Cultural Themes (Cambridge, Mass., 1957); J. Berliner, Factory and Manager in the USSR (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); M. Field, Doctor and Patient in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1958); and A. Inkeles and R. Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), which was specifically dedicated to studying ‘how Soviet society impinges on the individual and how he fits into the functioning pattern of
Soviet life’ (p. 3). Smaller oral history projects adopting a sociological approach were carried out in the early 1990s by Daniel Bertaux and Paul Thompson (published in Sud’ba liudei and On Living Through Soviet Russia) and by the Moscow School of Social and Economic Science (published in Golos krest’ian). The oral history of the Gulag has been pioneered by the Memorial Society (http://www.memo.ru), although of course the first great oral history of the subject was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, 3 vols. (London, 1974–8), which relied heavily on interviews with survivors of the labour camps.

  1: Children of 1917 (1917–28)

  1. RGALI, f. 3084, op. 1, d. 1389, l. 17; f. 2804, op. 1, d. 45.

  2. E. Drabkina, Chernye sukhari (Moscow, 1975), pp. 82–3.

  3. S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London, 2003), p. 61.

  4. RGALI, f. 2804, op. 1, d. 22, l. 4; f. 3084, op. 1, d. 1389, l. 3; Drabkina, Chernye sukhari, pp. 23–9; N. Burenin, Pamiatnye gody: vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1961), pp. 150–51.

  5. Partiinaia etika: dokumenty i materialy diskussii dvadtsatykh godov (Moscow, 1989), p. 16; M. Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917–18 (London, 1970), p. 7.

  6. Cited in E. Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), pp. 91–2.

  7. RGALI, f. 2804, op. 1, dd. 22, 40, 1389; V. Erashov, Kak molniia v nochi (Moscow, 1988), p. 344.

  8. O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1996), pp. 752–68.

  9. I. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 vols. (Moscow, 1946–55), vol. 6, p. 248.

  10. K. Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 61.

  11. L. Kirschenbaum, Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (New York, 2001), p. 48.