The Whisperers
Page 96
War Communism, 5–6
war scare (1927), 73
wedding rings, 161
Werth, Alexander, 415
Western states
influence, 441–3, 488
Soviet relations with, 229–30, 236, 371–2
whispering, 40, 44&n, 110, 184, 207, 230, 253, 264, 294
White Army, 4, 5, 58, 167, 218, 648, 654
White Sea Canal, The, 193–4
White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal), 94, 111, 206, 624
construction, 114–15, 121, 136, 196
in propaganda, 192–5, 624
writers tour (1933), 192–7
wives
arrest, 305
pressured to renounce husbands, 305, 306
unwanted, denunciation, 265
Wolf, Christa, 506
women
childcare role, 161
domestic slavery, 164, 165–6
equality, 8
husband’s innocence, belief in, 305–7
independence, 127
in labour camps, 356–68
marriage as camouflage, 137–8
military service, 417–19
in Norilsk, 427–9
rape by guards, 248, 364, 631, 632
regime and, 163–4
See also Akmolinsk Labour Camp; grandparents; mothers; wives
workers
anti-Soviet mood (1941), 385
complaints, 154, 187
living space, 172–3
post-war protests, 458–9
rewards, 153, 159–60, 161
workplace tribunals, 206
Writers’ Union, 255, 267, 268, 280, 281, 489
admission to, 486
anti-Semitism, 494–5, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 519, 520
First Congress (1934), 188
Pioneer camp, 540
reorganization (1946), 482–3
xenophobia, post-war, 487, 493, 585
yardmen, as informers, 180
Yefimov, Mikhail, 365–6, 567–8
Yeliseyeva, Vera, 296–7
Yevangulov family, 44
Yevangulova, Yevgeniia (Zhenia), 44–5, 257, 344–5
Yevseyev family, 289–90
Yevseyeva, Angelina, 13, 289, 290, 598
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 612n
Yezhov, Nikolai, 275
denounces Piatnitsky, 232, 233
downfall, 279–80
and Kremlin ‘spy ring’, 237
and mass arrests, 239, 279, 284
‘Yezhov terror’, 279
Yiddish culture, 68
Young Guard, The (Fadeyev), 461n, 504
youth, rural, 126–9
Zabolotsky, Nikolai, 484
Zaidler, Ernst, 512
Zalka, Mate (General Lukach), 200
Zalkind, A. B., 27
Zamiatin, Yevgeny, 10, 489
Zapregaeva, Olga, 97
Zaslavsky, David, 495&n
Zaveniagin, Avraam, 427
Zhadova, Katia, 610
Zhadova, Larisa, 608, 609, 610, 611
Zhdanov, Andrei, 487, 488&n, 491, 505
and Akhmatova, 489, 490
death, 465, 521
Leningraders, patronage, 465
‘Zhdanovshchina’, 487–92, 506
Zhukov, Anatoly, 578
Zhukov, Marshal Georgii
at Khalkin Gol, 371
post-war purge, 464–5&n
Second World War, 393, 422, 447
Zinoviev, Gregorii, 72, 230, 237, 248
recants (1934), 197
‘Zinovievites’, 237
Zionism, 70, 536
Zlobin, Stepan, 507–8
Znamensky, Georgii, 652, 653, 654
Znamia journal, 506, 619
Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 193–4, 488, 489, 490–92, 500n
Zuevka orphanage, 338
Zvezda journal, 488, 489
* The personal collections held in the archives of science, literature and art (e.g. SPbF ARAN, RGALI, IRL RAN) are sometimes more revealing, although most of these have closed sections in which the most private documents are contained. After 1991, some of the former Soviet archives took in personal collections donated by ordinary families – for example, TsMAMLS, which has a wide range of private papers belonging to Muscovites.
* Most of the archives were collected by the author in collaboration with the Memorial Society, a human rights and historical association organized in the late 1980s to represent and commemorate the victims of Soviet repression. Housed in the archives of the Memorial Society in St Petersburg (MSP), Moscow (MM) and Perm (MP), most of them are also available on line (http://www.orlandofiges.com) together with the transcripts and sound extracts of the interviews. Some of the materials are available in English. For more details on the research project connected with this book see the Afterword and Acknowledgements below.
* The Provisional Government was formed by liberals and moderate socialists to steer the country through to the end of the First World War and the democratic election of a Constituent Assembly. Its political authority soon collapsed, however, as workers, peasants and soldiers formed their own local revolutionary committees, the Soviets in particular, to carry out a radical social revolution. It was in the name of the Soviets that Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. The Bolsheviks, who numbered about 350,000 members on the eve of their insurrection, represented the revolutionary arm of the Social Democratic (Marxist) Party, whose moderate wing, the Mensheviks, supported the Provisional Government. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Russian Communist Party.
†There were plenty of examples to choose from, such as Aleksandr Fadeyev (the father of the future writer), who left his wife and three children to dedicate himself to the ‘people’s cause’ in 1905, or Liuba Radchenko, who left her husband and their two young daughters because, as she put it in her diary, ‘it was the duty of the true revolutionary not to be tied down by a family’ (RGAE, f. 9455, op. 3, d. 14, l. 56).
* After Marx and Engels – one of many Soviet names made up from the annals of the Revolution after 1917. Other common ‘Soviet’ names included: Vladlen (Vladimir Lenin), Engelina, Ninel, Marlen (for Marx and Lenin) and Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution).
* Leader of the White Armies in south Russia during the Civil War.
* Subbotniki, Saturday labour campaigns, were introduced in the Civil War. Students, workers and other citizens were dragooned as ‘volunteers’ into manual labour tasks such as clearing rubbish from the streets. It soon became a permanent feature of the Soviet way of life: not only days but whole weeks were set aside when the population would be called upon to work without pay.
* The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest party in Russia in 1917. Drawing their support from the peasantry, they held a majority in the Constituent Assembly, which was closed down by the Bolsheviks in January 1918.
* They were lishentsy (literally meaning the ‘disenfranchised’) – a category of people, mainly from the old intelligentsia, the petty bourgeoisie and the clergy, deprived of civil and electoral rights. During the 1920s the lishentsy were subjected to a growing level of discrimination by the Bolsheviks, with many families denied access to Soviet schools and state housing or deprived of ration cards.
* How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–4), Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel about the establishment of Soviet power and the heroic life of a Komsomol activist, Pavel Korchagin, which inspired many Soviet children in the 1930s and 1940s.
* Growing up in Rome, where she was born in 1924, Elena Volkonskaia recalls her mother using the same phrase. Born in 1893, Elena’s mother was the daughter of Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia 1906–11, and another graduate of the Smolny Institute (interview with Elena Volkonskaia, Cetona, July 2006).
* The Old Believers were adherents of the Russian Orthodox rituals observed before the Church reforms of the 1650s had brought them closer into line with those of the Greek Orthodox liturgy.
&nb
sp; * The government encouraged people to cremate their dead in secular Soviet ceremonies by providing free state cremations, but according to one morgue official in the early 1920s, ‘the Russians are still either too religious or too superstitious to part from the Orthodox burial traditions’ (GARF, f. 4390, op. 12, d. 40, l. 24).
* They christened him Kirill and called him that throughout his life, but when he embarked on his literary career, in the 1930s, he changed his name to Konstantin, because he found it awkward to pronounce his r’s. For the sake of clarity we shall call him Konstantin throughout the text.
* Fania and Iakov went to Iurev (Tartu) University in Estonia, one of the few universities in the Empire to admit Jews before 1917.
* Jews were allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement if they were merchants of the first guild, exceptionally talented craftsmen, university students or qualified pharmacists.
* The term ‘kulak’, derived from the word for a ‘fist’, was originally used by the peasants to distinguish exploitative elements (usurers, sub-renters of land, wheeler-dealers and so on) from the farming peasantry. An entrepreneurial peasant farmer, in their view, could not be a ‘kulak’, even if he hired labour. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, misused the term in a Marxist sense to describe any rich peasant. They equated the ‘kulak’ with a ‘capitalist’ on the false assumption that the use of hired labour in peasant farming (which was extremely rare in most of Russia) was a form of ‘capitalism’ (as opposed to a way of making up for shortages of labour on the farm). During the Civil War the Bolsheviks attempted to stir up class war in the countryside and requisition grain by organizing the landless peasants (mainly urban types) into Committees of the Poor (kombedy) against the ‘kulaks’, who were accused of hoarding grain. During collectivization the term ‘kulak’ was employed against any peasant – whether rich or poor – who was opposed to entering the collective farms.
* The Golovins had two barns, several pieces of machinery, three horses, seven cows, a few dozen sheep and pigs, two carts, as well as household property, which included iron bedsteads and a samovar, both signs of wealth in the Soviet countryside.
* The Christmas tree was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929, but in 1935 it was reinstated as the New Year tree. The New Year holiday shared many of the attributes of the traditional Christmas (the family gathering, the exchange of presents, the Father Christmas figure of Uncle Frost, etc.).
* The foundations leaked, even after they were blocked with tombstones from the city’s cemeteries. Children jumped the fences to swim in the foundations or to fish for carp. Building was halted by the outbreak of the war in 1941. It was not resumed. But pictures of the Palace continued to appear on matchboxes, and the local Metro stop (today’s Kropotkin Station) continued to be known as the Palace of the Soviets. The site was later turned into a swimming pool.
* Pavel Galitsky (b. 1911) remembers being questioned by his Party bosses at the Red Arsenal Factory in Leningrad during the purges of 1932. The son of a priest, Galitsky was the editor of the factory’s wall-newspaper. He had recently joined the Party, but his family background made him vulnerable. The head of the purge committee, who was the chairman of the regional Party committee and the factory’s director, put Galitsky on the spot by asking him to give a summary of ‘Lenin’s book The Anti-Dühring’ (there was no such work by Lenin, but there was a famous book by Friedrich Engels with that name that had outlined in encyclopedic detail the Marxist conception of philosophy, natural science and political economy). Galitsky had no idea about the book but, as he recalls, ‘I knew that anti meant against, so I said that Lenin wrote against this Dühring, and they said, “Correct! Well done, clever lad!”’ (MSP, f. 3, op. 53, d. 2, l. 6).
* In August 1935, the Donbass coalminer Aleksei Stakhanov dug a record amount of coal. Widely applauded in the national press, his achievement began a movement of rewarding skilled and devoted workers, efficiency being one of the stated aims of the Second Five Year Plan. Stakhanovism soon developed into another form of ‘shock labour’ in which workers who had exceeded the production quotas were rewarded with bonuses in pay, consumer goods, better housing and even promotion to administrative jobs (especially in the police). For the Stalinist regime, the movement was a means of raising the production norms and of lowering the basic rates of pay by making workers more dependent on piece rates. It placed enormous pressure on managers and officials, who took the blame (and were frequently denounced as ‘saboteurs’ and ‘wreckers’) when shortages of fuel or raw materials prevented the Stakhanovites from meeting their targets.
* In October 1935, Stalin made a well-publicized visit to his mother in Tbilisi. It began a press campaign to show the Party leader as a family man. Stalin was photographed in the Kremlin gardens with his children, something he had never permitted before (most Soviet people had never even known that Stalin had children).
* For this reason she wishes to remain anonymous.
* Psychiatrists have also found a high proportion of people suffering from paranoia and schizophrenic delusions among long-term residents.
* It is possible that Simonov was thinking here of Pyotr Palchinsky (1875–1929), the mining engineer whom Kerensky placed in command of the Winter Palace in October 1917. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, Palchinsky was released and subsequently allowed to resume his work at the Russian Technical Institute during the 1920s. He was rearrested in 1928 and executed the next year. There were many camp legends about famous prisoners like Palchinsky, and it seems that Simonov was taken in by one of them.
* There is no record of Piatnitsky’s speech, and no surviving stenographic record of the June plenum, although there is evidence which suggests that whatever Piatnitsky had said was erased from the corrected stenogram (a common practice in the archives of the Central Committee) where it might encourage other dissidents. Before closing the last plenum session on 29 June, Stalin announced: ‘As far as Piatnitsky is concerned, the investigation is ongoing. It should be completed in the next few days.’ At the bottom of the page there is a handwritten note by one of Stalin’s secretaries: ‘This communication was crossed out by comrade Stalin because it should not go into the stenogram’ (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 2, d. 622, l. 220). There may be other records of the alleged incident in closed archives (such as the Presidential Archive in the Kremlin). Until that evidence becomes available, the only record of Piatnitsky’s stand against the mass arrests of the Old Bolsheviks comes from his son Vladimir, who claims to have reconstructed the events of the June plenum from his father’s personal file in the FSB archive, fragmentary evidence in other archives and the alleged reminiscences of Kaganovich, as related to him by Samuil Guberman, the head of Kaganovich’s secretariat (Zagovor, pp. 59–70; interviews with Vladimir Piatnitsky, St Petersburg, September 2005. See also, in support of the Piatnitsky version of events, B. Starkov, ‘Ar’ergardnye boi staroi partiinoi gvardii’, in Oni ne molchali (Moscow, 1991), pp. 215–25).
* It is possible that Stalin had a hand in the murder of Kirov. The Leningrad Party boss was a very popular and more moderate leader than Stalin, who had good reason to be afraid that Kirov might emerge as a serious rival to his leadership. No hard evidence has ever come to light of Stalin’s role in his murder. But Stalin used the murder to pursue his obsession with an internal threat and to persecute his ‘enemies’.
* They are epitomized by Rubashov, the old revolutionary in Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1940), who confesses to the treason charges made against him at his trial – even though he knows that he is innocent – because he wants to serve the state.
* At a meeting of Party workers and combine-operators in December 1935, one young combine-operator said that he would fight for the victory of socialism even though he was the son of a ‘kulak’, to which Stalin replied: ‘A son does not answer for his father.’ The press seized on this mendacious slogan and built it up into the ‘directive’ of Stalin.
* Irina never found out about his death. She continued to look
for him, writing hundreds of letters to the Soviet authorities until her own death in 1974. After 1956, Irina was invited to rejoin the Party, but she refused.
* In 1941, Igor was charged again with organizing a ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracy’, this time involving children of ‘enemies of the people’, and five more years were added to his sentence. He returned to Leningrad in 1948, but was soon rearrested for ‘counterrevolutionary agitation’ and sentenced to five years (he served eight) in the Norilsk labour camp.
* Their father, Pavel Bulat, was a political economist at the Military-Political Academy in Leningrad; their mother, Nina, an engineer and geologist.
* Ida was interviewed for the BBC film The Hand of Stalin (1989).
* After the collapse of Communism, Liuba became an active member of her church and published her own book about the life of her father (L. Tetiueva, Zhizn’ pravoslavnogo sviashchennika, Perm, 2004).
* Elizaveta had no photograph of her mother until the early 1990s, when she received her mother’s file from the former KGB archives.
* After the outbreak of the war, in June 1941, prisoners who had served their sentences in the prison zone were forced to live and work in the barracks settlement. A prisoner sentenced to three years in 1938 would thus not be released from ALZhIR until 1945.