“Well, well, Vasilii Vasil’evich you’ve build yourself a dacha in the woods, now build a winter palace next to us,” they joked. “Sure, sure, we’re glad that you are not separating yourself from us.”
So Mitia and I lugged in all kinds of junk from the ravine next to the farmstead. We mixed clay right on the spot and built a hut. We made bricks and built an oven, covered the roof, plastered the walls, put in a door and window frames, and built a table and four stools.
“Now, sister,” I said, “get ready. We’re going to the village into society, to your own home. You’ll live freely and unconstrained.”
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My sister immediately broke out into tears.
“What have you planned? To get rid of me?” And the complaints started.
“I don’t have a garden there. Where will I get seedlings? And what will I do there? If I had a sewing machine, I could sew and make a living, but what will I do there?”
Nevertheless, I moved her to the new home saying:
“Here you’ll be a gardener yourself and you’ll have enough seedlings for half the village.”
She smiled through her tears: “We know these tender persuasions. Then I’ll have to suffer with the children in any way I know.”
Toward the winter we bought her a sewing machine and a cow. We built a spacious shed. Mother gave her some chickens. In the spring we dug a seed-plot, planted cabbage seeds, and instructed the children to water them and guard them against the hens. My sister became more cordial to Mitia and me. We often visited each other for various reasons since there are many of these among those who love each other. Mitia and I stayed alone. Then we took in two boys who had lost both parents. They spent the winter with us, got used to the place, and were happy. But for some dark reason, their grandfather then took them. Afterwards Mitia’s brother and his wife died and left six children. The older brothers were already adults, about twenty years old. They remained living in their home and we helped them.
The infant girl was taken by a peasant woman, adding to her own three children. Mitia and I took the four-year-old boy. People who were curious came to us from various places expressing a desire to live with us jointly. But they soon became bored and left, finding a more attractive life style. They went where people walked about with clean hands and did not dig in the dirt, where they ate ready-baked, clean bread produced by those who lead a boring life and dig in the dirt. They became “wise leaders” thinking that peasants could not make it without their help. They engaged in all kinds of science, acting in theaters, dancing, playing football, chess, and performing somersaults beyond the clouds, etc. At the same time, however, they carefully made sure that the peasants should not eat up their own portion of bread by themselves. Otherwise, one could die from hunger with all one’s cultural games and pursuits.
Only a religious-moral attitude towards life helps a person choose a requisite labor and hold to it irrespective of any difficulties. It is to be carried out urgently and only leftover time may be allotted to amusements, merriment, and carousing. Only having set upon this path of the working peasant can a person establish brotherly relationships with people, be independent, and not sell his labor, creating exploiters in so doing. Additionally, he himself can respect another such brother-toiler.
Part Three
Unrelenting Order and Terror: 1930–1953
By 1930, the first Five Year Plan was in effect. It ushered in consequences that no one could foretell, policies that no one had ever seen, and terror that no one accused could survive.
The two main thrusts were forcible industrialization and collectivization. Through centralized planning and implementation, industrialization was slated to proceed at such a rapid pace that the Soviet Union was then, theoretically, to enter the ranks of the world’s leading industrial nations. Huge amounts of money were channeled into the most extensive projects—heavy industry at a massive and rapid scale. Though at an enormous cost, human and fiscal, close to a tripling of heavy industrial production was achieved by the time the plan ended in 1932.
Collectivization refers to the lumping of millions of individual farms into huge kolkhozes, or collective farms. Neither ideology nor economic theorizing could explain why this would not work. It would not have mattered anyway as the process rammed its way through the Russian countryside. Agriculture, which had shown signs of recovery in the late 1920’s, was devastated with huge drops in all the standard measures, from grain production to heads of livestock. The one measure that was the most “innovative” was also the least understood by the population and the most feared. This was the brutality of forced collectivization.
Some 15,000,000 people perished by means of forced starvation, execution, or concentration camps to insure collectivization that became entrenched. At the time of the formal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, agriculture had yet to recover from collectivization since the system was still in place.
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Violence and fear were the great handmaidens of the Stalinist era. True totalitarianism manifested itself. Though party functionaries could write off the human devastation of collectivization, it was another story with the Great Purges of 1936-1938. Here Stalin endeavored to cleanse society and the Communist Party itself of every conceivable blemish, enemy, or opponent. Most of these perceptions were a result of his paranoia. But they were manifested as mass executions of the innocent and true believer. Even the armed forces, which lost some three-quarters of its senior officers, could not avoid the purging.
Through the 1930’s and right up to Stalin’s death in March 1953, Soviet society is best understood in terms of unprecedented regimentation. The discussion above points clearly to order and terror. Because this was so pervasive and complete, regimentation could be attempted and effected. Socialist realism forced literature and the arts into a straitjacket. The League of Militant Atheists served as the state arm to help repress religion. Science, whether mathematics or biology, had to serve the ideological strictures of the State. History was periodically rewritten so that the “fact” fit party requirements. Informing on family or neighbors who might not be reliable citizens was strongly encouraged. And the Gulag expanded with an unparalleled rapidity since it had to absorb millions of the arrested. As the writers Ilf and Petrov pointed out, loving Soviet power was not enough. It had to love you.1
With the opening of numerous Soviet archives in recent years, the knowledge of the death toll under Stalin has become more precise. In referring to the Soviet State and its leaders from Lenin through Stalin, Woodford Mc-Clellan asks: “How many did they kill one way or another? The Holocaust in Russia antedated the one in the Third Reich and took as many as 40 million and perhaps as many as 60 million lives.”2 An exceedingly difficult question to answer is how a nation survives this.
Survival is, of course, the greatest theme of World War II. Bearing the brunt of Hitler’s attack in June 1941, (the most powerful military operation ever), the Soviet Union was ultimately a heroic victor. The great battles of Stalingrad and Kursk proved Germany would not win. Leningrad, surviving a 900-day siege wherein over one and a half million people starved to death, proved, if one ever had doubt, a Russian tenacity and resiliency that is barely imaginable. These were also among the intangibles that allowed the Soviet Union to claim ultimate victory, even though three fourths of the German army was engaged against it, not the West. Small wonder that Stalin insisted on territorial “concessions” after the war.
The post-war years did not grant the nation any political gifts. Repression and regimentation again became the norm. The thought of any comfort social, cultural, political, religious, or economic—was only a dream foundered on a
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harsh reality. But death began to shift that reality, Stalin’s death. The mid 1950’s were to witness a collective sigh of relief, and the surge of a long dormant positive hope.
Nickolas Lupinin
NOTES
As pointed out by Woodford McClellan, Russia: The Soviet Period and After, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1998), p. 97.
McClellan, 97.
Chapter Twenty
B. Brovtsyn, Dearly Beloved
The persecution of religion was a notorious feature of the Soviet State, one that began shortly after the Bolshevik seizure of power. By the late 1920’s and through the 1930’s, this had developed into a total attack encompassing mass destruction of churches, arrests of believers, frequently leading to dismissal from work, imprisonment and execution. In this noxious atmosphere public profession of religion was simply dangerous. Brovtsyn describes an intimate situation. He and his fiancee, both scientists, had to go to great lengths to have a secret church wedding. Taken from B. Brovtsyn, “Pervogo iunia na Lakhte” [The First of June on the Lakhta River]. New York: The New Review, No. 158, March, 1985.
The place, where I was born, spent the first nine years of my life, and to which I returned from the place of my parents’ exile almost an adult, at age fifteen, has been best described by Pushkin:
Along the mossy, swampy shores Blackened huts here and there, Shelter of a wretched Finn. And the forest, unpenetrated by light In the haze of the hidden sun, Rustled all around.
Both the mossy shore and the swampy marsh have remained. The northern shore of the Gulf of Finland from Petrograd to the west is covered with forests. In the lowlands there were marshes where in autumn bright red cranberries ripened on their thin stems. On the pine tree-covered knolls nestled stunted, dark red foxberries, with glittering, rigid little leaves. And
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everywhere, to the very edge of the marshes, were modest, small, sweet, Russian blueberries. One could also find mushrooms if one knew places in the seaside Finnish forest.
At the Lakhta station, as I recall, women vendors would come out to the trains with dozens of “White” mushrooms [boleti] in wooden baskets.
Lakhta is not far from Staraia Derevnia, on the outskirts of Petrograd, about several versts in all from it. It is separated from Staraia Derevnia by a vast and swampy marsh that is covered by stunted shrubbery, and is flooded by waters from the gulf pushed inland by the November west winds. The railroad from Staraia Derevnia to Lakhta skirts the marsh and runs along a road paved with cobblestones. Many dachas are located along the cobblestone road and the several streets that cross it, leading towards the seashore. In the old days these were rented to Petersburg city-dwellers. One of the cross streets, Gardnerovskaia, is connected with the history of my family.
John Gardner, master of the oakum business, came from England to Russian in the previous [19th] century. His profession was the caulking of the planks of newly built ships with oakum. Having founded his own business and conscientiously filling the orders of the Admiralty, old man Gardner became rich, as Russia became rich at the end of the previous century and the beginning of this one. At Lakhta, John Gardner built about ten dachas. He gave a red dacha to his son, Genrikh Ivanovich, the father of my cousins. Another, a big dacha with two annexes, he gave to his son Fedor Ivanovich, a sickly fellow for many years, who was looked after by a Russian woman, Nastas’ia Vasil’evna. After a time she became Mrs. Gardner, but the only English she ever learned was to call her pooch “doggie.” On the wall of her sitting room hung a portrait of Lord Kitchener, about whom she knew very little. However, she was very proud of this portrait.
Old man Gardner left nothing to his daughter Zhanetta Ivanovna. Zhanetta Ivanovna, a slender, tall, and stately lady, who must have been beautiful in youth, married well, settled in Moscow, and had no need of a dacha in Lakhta. She married Bruno Vasil’evich Farikh, a man of prominence in pre-revolu-tionary Moscow, who was in the insurance business. Their two sons had good careers in Soviet times. The elder somehow received a university education and became a well-known engineer, with a specialization in the machine-tool industry. The younger, Fabio Farikh, became a prominent Soviet arctic pilot. Later, he was shot as a man of foreign origins. The very same fate befell his brother, Bruno, as well.
By the beginning of the thirties, only one Gardner dacha remained—all the rest having been burned in 1917—the dacha belonging to Nastas’ia Vasil’evna Gardner. My fate was also connected with her home.
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Having been found to be a British national, she was expelled, poor thing, beyond the borders of the USSR shortly before the Soviet-German war. The English created a shelter in Estonia for such Russian-English persons, where Nastas’ia Vasil’evna, not knowing one word of English, except for the word “doggie,” suffered among other half-English people. Finally, having refused British citizenship, she managed to return to the USSR. She was not permitted to go to Lakhta, since her home had already been confiscated and divided into communal apartments. She was given a room in a communal apartment in Petrograd, and on the eve of the war she was sent to Siberia.
In the beginning of the ’30s, my family and I lived peacefully, but with great difficulty. Every summer my mother’s brother rented one of the two-room apartments in N.V. Gardner’s dacha. He lived there with his common-law wife, Elizaveta Ivanovna Shliakova, who was a resident of Petersburg. His lawful wife, having sent their daughter to her sister’s abroad, went herself to France in 1929 with a Soviet visa, naively hoping that my uncle, who received the rank of midshipman of the Imperial Fleet in 1916, would join the merchant marine and on the first foreign voyage jump ship. However, he never even thought of doing this. The fate and character of my uncle reminded me of Dr. Zhivago in Pasternak’s novel, although Elizaveta Ivanovna was a real Soviet worker, an accountant at Elektrotok [electric generation department], and not a romantic Lara, and my uncle was not a poet. However, he was indecisive and resigned to his fate, completely like Yurii Zhivago. When he was mobilized and sent to the Volga flotilla to fight against the whites, he resigned himself to this as well, instead of escaping south to join Denikin [commanding general of the White Army].
Not far from Nastas’ia Vasil’evna’s dacha at the shore of the gulf stood a half-deserted church in the forest. My uncle knew the priest. Soviet life was such that to attend church, while not completely dangerous, was all the same risky. It was 1934. My aunt (once removed) on my father’s side, Lidiia Petro-vna Engel’ke, having provided me with the fundamentals of a religious education, had died long ago. Grandmother Brovtsyn outlived her son (my father) by two years and died in 1933, when I was away on an expedition to Sakhalin. My mother and my uncle remained Lutherans. In my rather small world there were no remaining Orthodox. The external situation, the burdens of life, and the closed churches were not conducive for contact with religion. I did not go to church. In earlier times on Easter, for many years in a row, my friends and I tried to get into the Trinity Cathedral, located on the grounds of the Izmailovskii Regiment, or into the Nikol’skii Cathedral near the Mariin-skii Theater. But the crowd was always so large even outside the cathedrals, that not once did I manage to be at Easter service inside a church.
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Shortly after the New Year of 1934, I proposed to my future wife, Nina Sergeevna Miagkova. We were at that time little more than twenty years old; we were captivated by hydrology, the science of rivers, and took part in expeditions. Nina had just graduated from Petrograd [Leningrad] University.
Birth, marriage, and death are the milestones of the beginning, middle, and end of a person’s journey through life. An Orthodox person’s beginning coincides with the sacrament of baptism, the middle with the sacrament of marriage, and the end with extreme unction. Before me stood a task: how to secretly fulfill the sacrament of marriage so that no one would suspect anything at work and that no difficulties, with possibly lethal consequences, would arise. My fiancée’s position was even more dangerous. She had been working for two years in the military section of the
State Institute of Hydrology. Among the duties of my bride, a field hydrologist of the SIH, was the investigation of the western Soviet borders, for clarification of the condition of the roads, the extent of their ability to carry traffic, and the nature of vast marshes and lowlands adjacent to the western border of Belorussia. If the SIH had found out about her intentions to marry in a church, she would have been deprived of her security clearance, and she would not have been able to do field work. Not that the fact of visiting a church or attending a wedding was important for the authorities, but rather they were interested in a person’s mindset, his mood. Everything connected with the church was considered disloyal by the authorities and aroused distrust in them.
My uncle talked it over with the priest of the Lakhta church. The priest agreed to marry us and suggested that we come towards evening, when almost no people would be around. We chose the first of June 1934 as the day of our wedding.
It turned out that there was no white fabric for a bridal dress, and no one to sew it, and no gold for the wedding rings. Sweet wine, for a toast to the betrothed, could not be obtained anywhere (at that time it was known not as buying but as “obtaining.”) And I only knew of champagne from my mother’s stories. My fiancée bought, from one of her colleagues, vouchers for Torgsin [foreign goods store], where she purchased white silk. On Fontanka at Nikol’skii Lane, in a former servants’ room, lived a crippled old woman, Anna Vasil’evna. My fiancée’s sister lived with her husband and daughter in the same apartment. Anna Vasil’evna was a parishioner of the Nikol’skii Cathedral and later arranged the baptismal of our daughter there. She lived without a pension, without charity, sewing clothes for acquaintances probably for money, cleaned the church, and looked after children.
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