The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  38. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, p. 80; Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 237.

  39. G. Kessler, ‘The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 42, nos. 2–4 (2001), pp. 477–504; D. Shearer, ‘Social Disorder, Mass Repression and the NKVD during the 1930s’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 42, nos. 2–4 (2001), pp. 505, 519–20. See also D. Shearer, ‘Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932–1952’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 76 (December 2004), pp. 835–81.

  40. Tragediia sovetskoi derevni, vol. 3, p. 63; A. Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the SovietCamps (London, 2003), p. 333; GARF, f. 5207, op. 3, d. 49, l. 190; f. 8131, op. 37, d. 137, l. 4.

  41. L. Viola, ‘Tear the Evil From the Root: The Children of Spetspereselentsy of the North’, in N. Baschmakoff and P. Fryer (eds.), Modernization of the Russian Provinces, special issue of Studia Slavica Finlandensia, 17 (April 2000), pp. 4, 44, 48–9 (translation of quotation slightly changed for clarity), 51; Politbiuro i krest’ianstvo, p. 47. For more on the ‘special settlements’ see L. Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford, 2007); N. Werth, Cannibal Island: Death in a Siberian Gulag (Princeton, 2007).

  42. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 2, ll. 25–6; d. 3, ll. 12–18, 125.

  43. MP, f. 4, op. 18, d. 2; d. 5, ll. 16–17.

  44. MP, f. 4, op. 5, d. 2, ll. 37, 38.

  45. Politbiuro i krest’ianstvo, pp. 467–553; Viola, The Unknown Gulag, p. 232.

  46. MP, f. 4, op. 9, d. 5, ll. 2–7.

  47. AMILO, M. A. Solomonik, ‘Zapiski raskulachennoi’, ts., pp. 7–34.

  48. Pravda, 7 November 1929.

  49. AFA, A. M. Alekseyev, ‘Vospominaniia’, p. 18.

  50. See e.g. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 368, l. 115. See also the revealing hindsight comments by Aleksei Loginov, the director of the Gulag mining complex in Norilsk from 1954 to 1957, in A. Macqueen, ‘Survivors’, Granta, 64 (Winter 1998), p. 45.

  51. For a classic political interpretation of the Gulag system see R. Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (London, 1992), and same author, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (New York, 1978). The economic dimension has been emphasized by M. Jakobson, Origins of the Gulag: The Soviet Prison Camp System, 1917–1934 (Lexington, 1993); G. Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1997); and by several scholars in P. Gregory and V. Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Stanford, 2003). For a scholarly account of the Gulag’s early years that combines both these views see O. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, 2004).

  52. Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, 1923–1960. Spravochnik (Moscow, 1998), p. 395; Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 31–40.

  53. GARF, f. 5446, op. 11 a, d. 555, l. 32; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 746, l. 11; Sistema ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei v SSSR, p. 38.

  54. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 2920, l. 178; Applebaum, Gulag, pp. 62–5; C. Joyce, ‘The Gulag in Karelia, 1929–41’, in Gregory and Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor, p. 166; N. Baron, ‘Conflict and Complicity: The Expansion of the Karelian Gulag, 1923–33’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 42, nos. 2–4 (2001), p. 643; A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 3 vols. (London, 1974–8), vol. 2, p. 99.

  55. MSP, f. 3, op. 19, d. 2, ll. 1–4.

  56. GARF, f. 5515, op. 33, d. 11, ll. 39–40; GASO, f. 148, op. 5, d. 26, l. 75.

  57. GARF, f. 9414, op. 1, d. 3048, ll. 25–36; V. Shalamov, Vishera: antiroman (Moscow, 1989), p. 23.

  58. D. Nordlander, ‘Magadan and the Economic History of the Dalstroi in the 1930s’, in Gregory and Lazarev (eds.), The Economics of Forced Labor, p. 110.

  59. V. Shalamov, Kolyma Tales (London, 1994), pp. 368–9. Shalamov arrived at Kolyma in 1937, so much of what he writes about the Berzin period is based on camp legend.

  60. MP, f. 4, op. 10, d. 1, ll. 1–4, 14–17.

  61. A. Barmine, One Who Survived: The Life Story of a Russian Under the Soviets (New York, 1945), p. 196.

  62. C. Ward, Stalin’s Russia (London, 1999), p. 56; A. Smith, I Was a Soviet Worker (London, 1937), p. 43.

  63. Interviews with Lydia Pukhova, St Petersburg, May, October 2004.

  64. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 2, ll. 23–4, 26, 29; d. 3, ll. 20, 63–70.

  65. Y. Druzhnikov, Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov (London, 1997), pp. 45–6, 155–6; C. Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London, 2005), 2. p. 66.

  66. Druzhnikov, Informer, pp. 19–20, 30–31, 42, 114, 152; Kelly, Comrade, pp. 13, 94. Kelly (who has seen the secret police file) doubts that there was a trial of Morozov. In her view, Pavlik’s denunciation was fabricated by the police and the press (pp. 251–8).

  67. Kelly, Comrade, pp. 26–72.

  68. Druzhnikov, Informer, pp. 9–11; Kelly, Comrade, p. 14.

  69. Kelly, Comrade, p. 156 (translation slightly altered for clarity).

  70. See ibid., pp. 22, 26–9, 169–71.

  71. M. Nikolaev, Detdom (New York, 1985), p. 89.

  72. V. Danilov, Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevnia: naselenie, zemlepol’zovanie, khoziaistvo (Moscow, 1977), p. 25; P. Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 186; Ocherki byta derevenskoi molodezhi (Moscow, 1924), pp. 10–12.

  73. Interviews with Nina Gribelnaia, St Petersburg, March, June, October 2004; AFSBTO, Arkhivno-sledstvennoe delo F. Z. Medvedeva.

  74. Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, p. 295; Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, p. 256.

  75. Vskhody kommuny, 19 December 1932; K. Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 308 (translation slightly altered for clarity).

  76. A. Mar’ian, Gody moi, kak soldaty: dnevnik sel’skogo aktivista, 1925–53 (Kishinev, 1987), pp. 55, 71, 78–9.

  77. Cited in Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia, p. 140.

  78. A. Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture, 1923–1939 (Bloomington, 2006), p. 61. My thanks to Anna Shternshis for making available a transcript of the interview with Sofia G.

  79. V. Baevskii, ‘Syn kulaka i vrag naroda: A. T. Tvardovskii v Smolenske v 1937 g.’, in Stalinizm v rossiiskoi provinstii: smolenskie arkhivnye dokumenty v pochtenii zarubezhnykh i rossiiskikh istorikov (Smolensk, 1999), p. 256.

  80. Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury (Moscow, 1997), p. 109; Baevskii, ‘Syn kulaka’, pp. 255–8.

  81. I. Tvardovskii, ‘Stranitsy perezhitogo’, Iunost’, 1988, no. 3, pp. 14, 18.

  82. Ibid., p. 23.

  83. Ibid., p. 26.

  84. Ibid., p. 27.

  85. E. Iaroslavskii (ed.), Kak provodit’ chistku partii (Moscow, 1929), p. 10.

  86. See S. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society’, in S. Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowitch and R. Stites (eds.), Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, 1991), pp. 21–33.

  87. G. Alexopoulos, ‘Portrait of a Con Artist as a Soviet Man’, Slavic Review, vol. 57, no. 4 (Winter 1998), pp. 774–90. See further, S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Making a Self for the Times: Impersonation and Imposture in 20 th Century Russia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 2, no. 3 (Summer 2001), pp. 469–87; and same author, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005).

  88. E. Bonner, Mothers and Daughters (London, 1992), p. 317.

  89. S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), pp. 118–38.

  90. Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia, pp. 141–2. See further Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 133.

  91. B. Engel and A. Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, A Revolution of their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, 1997), pp. 29–32 (translation slightly altered for clarity).


  92. Geiger, The Family in Soviet Russia, p. 143; N. Novak-Decker (ed.), Soviet Youth: Twelve Komsomol Histories (Munich, 1959), p. 99.

  93. RGALI, f. 1814, op. 10, d. 339, l. 6.

  94. RGALI, f. 1814, op. 10, d. 339, l. 3.

  95. K. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia (Moscow, 1990), pp. 29–30.

  96. RGALI, f. 1814, op. 10, d. 339, l. 5.

  97. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka, p. 32.

  98. Ibid., p. 33.

  99. Ibid., pp. 35–6.

  100. W. Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (London, 1957), p. 143.

  101. J. Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939)’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44 (1996), pp. 350, 353–5 (translation slightly altered for clarity).

  102. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 3, l. 22.

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

  104. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 2, l. 38.

  105. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 2, l. 84.

  106. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 2, ll. 119–20.

  3: The Pursuit of Happiness (1932–6)

  1. SLFA, letter from Fania and Sonia Laskina to Gavril Popov, 18 May 1990; M. Laskin, ‘Vospominaniia’, ms., p. 31; interviews with Fania Laskina and Aleksei Simonov, Moscow, July 2004, March 2005.

  2. T. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 214, 270ff.

  3. RGALI, f. 2772, op. 1, d. 93, l. 2; Colton, Moscow, pp. 280, 327.

  4. RGALI, f. 2772, op. 1, d. 6, l. 24; d. 87, l. 5.

  5. RGALI,, f. 2772, op. 1, d. 94, l. 55; D. Neutatz, Die Moskauer Metro: Von den ersten Planen bis zur Grossbaustelle des Stalinismus (1897–1935), Beitrage zur Geschichte Osteuropas 33 (Vienna, 2001), pp. 173, 181–2; Colton, Moscow, p. 257; Pravda, 20 May 1935, p. 3.

  6. RGALI, f. 2772, op. 1, d. 97, ll. 17–18.

  7. RGALI, f. 2772, op. 1, d. 87, l. 87; d. 90, ll. 20–21; interview with Fania Laskina, Moscow, November 2003.

  8. E. Zaleski, Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918–1932 (Chapel Hill, 1971), p. 120; N. Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State: A Study of Soviet Managers and Technicians 1928–1935 (London, 1979), p. 71; S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 199–200; R. Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–30 (London, 1989), pp. 134–5.

  9. A good sampling of these letters can be found in Obshchestvo i vlast’ 1930-e gody: povestvovanie v dokumentakh (Moscow, 1998) and Stalinism as a Way of Life: A Narrative in Documents, edited by L. Siegelbaum and A. Sokolov (New Haven, 2000).

  10. See L. Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford, 1996); same author, ‘Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 45–69; J. Rossman, ‘The Teikovo Cotton Workers’ Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender and Identity Politics in Stalin’s Russia’, Russian Review, vol. 56, no. 1 (January 1997), pp. 44–69.

  11. Interviews with Lev Molotkov, St Petersburg, May 2003; Zinaida Belikova, St Petersburg, October 2003; MUFA, A. Golovanov, ‘Tetradki’, ms., p. 16.

  12. TsKhDMO, f. 1, op. 23, d. 1265, l. 43.

  13. J. Arch Getty and O. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, 1999), pp. 52–4.

  14. Ibid., p. 126.

  15. S. Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), pp. 160–61; same author, Education and Social Mobility, pp. 178, 246.

  16. A. Man’kov, Dnevniki tridtsatykh godov (St Petersburg, 2001), pp. 82–3.

  17. Stalinism as a Way of Life, pp. 124–5 (translation slightly altered for clarity).

  18. L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York, 1972), pp. 136, 138.

  19. J. Gronow, Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (Oxford, 2003), p. 36; Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, p. 224.

  20. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 120, d. 138, ll. 78–9.

  21. D. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Stalinist Modernity (Ithaca, 2003), pp. 126, 131; N. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946), pp. 317–18. On the ideological role of kul’turnost’ (‘cultured life’) in the 1930s: V. Volkov, ‘The Concept of Kul’turnost’ : Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions (London, 2000), pp. 210–30.

  22. L. Trotsky, Problems of Everyday Life: Creating the Foundations of a New Society in Revolutionary Russia (London, 1973), p. 98.

  23. K. Gerasimova, ‘Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment’, in D. Crowley and S. Reid (eds.), Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford, 2002), p. 210; V. Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford, 1999), p. 78.

  24. S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), pp. 150–55; K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981), p. 115; J. Brooks, ‘Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s’, in S. White (ed.), New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, 1992), p. 34; Timasheff, The Great Retreat, pp. 199–200, 202; C. Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London, 2005), p. 158.

  25. Interview with Marina Ivanova, St Petersburg, March 2004.

  26. I. Shikheeva-Gaister, Semeinaia khronika vremen kul’ta lichnosti: 1925–1953 (Moscow, 1998), pp. 15–17.

  27. J. Barber, ‘The Worker’s Day: Time Distribution in Soviet Working-Class Families, 1923–36’, paper presented to the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, 1978.

  28. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 156.

  29. MFA, L. Makhnach, ‘Oskolki bylogo s vysoty nastoiashchego’, ms., pp. 2–5; interviews with Leonid Makhnach, Moscow, March, July 2004.

  30. MFA, L. Makhnach, ‘Otets’, ms., pp. 2–4.

  31. MFA, Vladimir to Maria Makhnach, 29 November 1935.

  32. GFA, O. Golovnia, ‘Predisloviia k pis’mam…’ ms., pp. 3–4, 6, 12, 14, 47.

  33. GFA, O. Golovnia, ‘Mezhdu kratovym i otdykhom’, ms., p. 1; ‘Predisloviia k pis’mam’, ms., p. 31; A. Golovnia, ‘Dnevnik’; interviews with Yevgeniia Golovnia, Moscow, March, July, October 2004.

  34. GFA, ‘Predisloviia k pis’mam…’, ms., pp. 40–43, 58–61.

  35. Ibid., p. 51.

  36. E. Osokina, Za fasadom ‘stalinskogo izobiliia’. Raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–41 (Moscow, 1998), pp. 128, 134; Man’kov, Dnevniki tridtsatykh godov, p. 272. See also Gronow, Caviar with Champagne, pp. 126–7.

  37. A. Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours: Blat, Networking and Informal Exchange (Cambridge, 1998); Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 63.

  38. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 46.

  39. S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 161, 171, 175–6, 477.

  40. N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (London, 1989), p. 135.

  41. See e.g. MSP, f. 3, op. 36, d. 2, ll. 3–9.

  42. MSP, f. 3, op. 44, d. 2, l. 57.

  43. The following section is based on interviews with thirty-seven residents of communal apartments during the 1930s. See the List of Interviews.

  44. K. Gerasimova, ‘Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment’, p. 208; V. Semenova, ‘Ravenstvo v nishchete: simvolicheskoe znachenie “kommunalok”’, in Sud’ba liudei: Rossiia xx vek. Biografii semei kak ob’ekt sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia (Moscow, 1996), p. 374.

  45. K. Gerasimova, ‘Public Spaces in the Communal Apartment’, in G. Rittersporn, M. Rolfe and J. Behrends (eds.), Public Spheres in Soviet-Type Societies (Sonderdruck, 2003), p. 167; I. Utekhin, Ocherki kommunal’nogo byta (Moscow, 2001), pp. 148–9.

  46. Interviews wit
h Aleksei Iurasovsky, Moscow, March, June 2005.

  47. P. Messana, Kommunalka. Une histoire de l’Union soviétique à travers l’appartement communautaire (Paris, 1995), pp. 16–17. See also R. Berg, Sukhovei. Vospominaniia genetika (Moscow, 2003), p. 140.

  48. SSEES, Pahl-Thompson Collection, E. V. Mamlin, pp. 1–7.

  49. Interview with Minora Novikova, Moscow, May 2005.

  50. Interview with Nina Paramonova, St Petersburg, June 2005.

  51. Interview with Ninel Reifshneider, Moscow, April 2005.

  52. MSP, f. 1, op. 16, d. 2, ll. 65–6; op. 23, d. 2, l. 93; Berg, Sukhovei, p. 141; interview with Elena Baigulova, St Petersburg, May 2005; SSEES, Pahl-Thompson Collection, E. V. Mamlin, p. 4.

  53. Gerasimova, ‘Public Spaces’, pp. 185–6.

  54. Interview with Nina Paramonova, St Petersburg, June 2005.

  55. V. Semystiaha, ‘The Role and Place of Secret Collaborators in the Informational Activity of the GPU-NKVD in the 1920s and 1930s (on the Basis of Materials of the Donbass Region)’, Cahiers du Monde Russe, vol. 42, nos. 2–4 (2001), pp. 231–44. See also P.Holquist, “‘Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillancein its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (September 1997), pp. 415–50.

  56. Interview with Nina Paramonova, St Petersburg, June 2005; M. Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror (New Jersey, 1995), p. 144.

  57. Interview with Natalia Grigoreva, St Petersburg, May 2005.

  58. Interview with anonymous, Moscow, March 2003.

  59. Interview with Yevgeniia Moiseyenko, St Petersburg, September 2005.

  60. Interview with Minora Novikova, Moscow, May 2005; SSEES, Pahl-Thompson Collection, G. E. Mamlina, p. 6.

  61. Interview with Nina Paramonova, St Petersburg, June 2005; interview with Yevgeniia Moiseyenko, St Petersburg, September 2005; MSP, f. 3, op. 16, d. 2, ll. 71–2.

  62. Gerasimova, ‘Public Privacy’, p. 224.

  63. Interviews with Inna Shikheyeva (Gaister), Moscow, May 2005; Elizaveta Chechik, Moscow, April 2005; Minora Novikova, Moscow, May 2005; Maia Rodak, Moscow, October 2004; Tatiana Vasileva, St Petersburg, May 2005; Elena Baigulova, St Petersburg, May 2005.