Moscow, 1937

by Karl Schlogel

  The camp had to be kept informed, so there were dozens of newspapers, with such titles as Perekovka (The Reforging), Kanaloarmeika (The Canal Army Paper), Perekovka tridtsatipiatnika (The Reforging of the Thirty-Fivers), Za novye liudi (For New Human Beings), Doloi negramotnost' (Down with Illiteracy), Na shturm trassy (Storm the Canal Route), and many others. The Perekovka is said to have had around 5,000 correspondents and a print run of 30,000. All newspapers bore the inscription: ‘It is forbidden to distribute this newspaper outside the camp’ or ‘May not be distributed outside camp limits’.49

  The camp contained a number of sports clubs, among them a flying club.50 On 30 June 1935, 300 members of the Dynamo camp club took part in the sportsmen’s parade in Red Square. Nor were the plastic arts neglected. In July 1935 works by the ‘canal soldiers’ were exhibited at a representative show of the camp as a whole.51

  The fundamental idea of re-education was endorsed in the highest places. The magazine Bolshevik reported that,

  In 1934, at an official function in an NKVD club to celebrate the completion of the Istra Dam, Comrade Kaganovich stressed that the canal had been built with the hands of former thieves, bandits, wreckers and former enemies of socialist society who had been transformed into conscious fighters for our canal by hard but useful labour on the route – the magnificent child of the Second Five-Year Plan … Nikolai Kovalev, Anastasia Pavlova and Boris Pintsburg, former criminal ‘35ers’, heroes of the White Sea project, who had been awarded the Red Banner by the government, are living proof of the limitless potential of the Bolshevik policy of improvement through labour … Even earlier, during the White Sea project, the most talented among the criminals had been sought out – Stepan Dudnik, for example, a former 35er who succeeded in turning himself into a serious artist on the building site of the White Sea Canal project. In our camp, the most capable artists joined together in a central atelier for the arts that had been organized by the gifted White Sea architect Gleb Kun.52

  It would appear that no one became so closely identified with the idea of re-education as Semen Firin, who was director of Dmitlag from 1933 to 1937. His arrival was preceded by rumours of his legendary achievements. He is depicted by some as a man who did not hide his sympathy for criminals and habitual offenders. But nor did he avoid the challenge posed by the ‘58ers’, and he sought out the talented people he needed to help him solve practical problems in the everyday life of the camp. Others portray him as the embodiment of cruelty, with total power over life and death.53 He was surrounded by legends and rumours. Born in 1898, the son of a small businessman in Vilna, he had left school after two years and worked as a clerk and then as a journeyman in a shoe factory before being called up into the army, from which he later deserted. He understood six languages, was conversant with literature and wrote passably well. In 1919 he was commander of the partisan unit ‘Rosa Luxemburg’ and fought in the Lithuanian Soviet division on the western frontier against the Lithuanian and Polish counter-revolution, in the course of which he was twice wounded. In 1929–30 he served in reconnaissance in the Red Army, with missions to Paris and Berlin, for which he received numerous medals and distinctions. In his leadership of the White Sea Canal project he was the most eloquent advocate of the idea of ‘reforging’. He was rewarded for this in 1935 with the Order of Lenin.54 On the new building site he surrounded himself with what amounted to a regular court – writers, musicians, artists, scholars, dancers, actors and sportsmen. He wanted to make use of the experience he had gained on the White Sea Canal. Stepan Dudnik, a habitual thief, later became a professor and folk artist. Another – Kun – is even said to have been accepted into the ranks of the Academy of Arts. Firin published the literary journal Storm the Canal Route, whose editorial meetings took place in his dacha. The poet Lada Mogilianskaia, who was shot in 1937, read her poems there, competing with another writer, Nikolai Shigulskii, who was likewise shot in 1937. The journalist Roma Tikhomirov, also shot in 1937, tells of his time in Prague, where he worked on behalf of the OGPU. Firin too was an experienced and well-travelled man, who could talk about his time in Warsaw, Vienna and Berlin and about his dream of opening a driving school. Firin took personal charge of the cultural activities of the camp. There is a photo of him in the midst of the artists in the chief arts centre in the Boris and Gleb Monastery – many of these artists were subsequently executed in 1937. Such artists were entrusted with the task of mobilizing the canal soldiers by creating posters and banners, which were then reproduced by the thousand every month in stencilled form. But exhibitions of their work were also put on in Moscow. Conversely, well-known artists from the capital came to view the exhibitions in Dmitlag. For example, Il'ia Mashkov, a well-known painter, wrote after a visit:

  Comrade Firin is the most powerful advocate of the re-education of the canal soldiers established by the Bolsheviks. The souls of the camp inmates revolve around him – he is brilliant at persuading them to take action, and they behave as he thinks necessary; they follow his instructions as if he were a gifted sculptor, who in this instance creates not a piece of sculpture, but living Soviet human beings.55

  Giving artistic form to everyday experience – banners, posters, the flags adorning the flotilla – that was the task assumed by the camp artists.

  Firin enlisted well-known contributors for his magazine. He arranged for the writer Lev Nitoburg, whose novels had appeared in Novyi mir, and for the journalist Roman Tikhomirov to be transferred to Dmitrov from a camp in Siberia.56 Both men were shot in 1937. Firin pressured the major newspapers to publish accounts of perekovka. He had his magazine Storm the Canal Route delivered to Moscow and brought his influence to bear to obtain commendations for his best workers. He tried to have prison sentences commuted and to procure early releases. He invited well-known writers and artists to come to the building project, and brought sporting clubs and football teams to Dmitrov, including Spartak, ZDKA and Dynamo.57

  ‘I have seen a country that has been transformed into one great camp’

  Firin was arrested on 28 April 1937. He was ordered to go to Moscow, and once there he was detained. Over 200 other people were arrested at the same time. Firin was condemned on 14 August and shot. Other leading members of the management of the Moscow–Volga Canal were likewise arrested and shot: Sergei Pushitskii was arrested on 9 May 1937 and condemned to death on 19 June; A. Sorokin died by his own hand in 1937; V. Radetskii was shot in 1938; S. Katznelson, Firin’s successor, was shot in October 1938.58

  In his memoirs, an eyewitness captured the confusing juxtaposition of the celebratory opening of the canal and the arrests with lethal outcome, of release for some and arrest for others.

  The preparations were all in place, the banks of the canal were decorated with flags, with the portraits of the great, produced by artists in the camp. The camp’s printing shop had produced 2,000 invitations for the maiden voyage on the canal. On 30 April 1937, the festive flotilla set sail on the man-made waterway … At the same time, the arrests of the ‘enemies of the people’ were already under way. It started with the arrest of the top management of the construction works. The canal itself was enjoying the celebrations, but the lighthearted mood was mixed with unease and anxiety; the sounds of the orchestra merged with the sirens of the cars that had come to take the victims away one after the other. Among those arrested were Sergei Bykhovskii, the head of the Volga construction site, Sergei Pushitskii, the head of the 3rd Section, and, most astonishing of all, Semen Firin himself, the head of Dmitlag, who was arrested two days before the May Day holiday.59

  Over 200 people were executed in connection with the ‘Firin case’ alone, as members of a counter-revolutionary organization whose aim was to destroy the leaders of both the Party and the government. The Kremlin was to be taken over by the canal zone at one fell swoop. The paradox, of course, was that Firin, the head of Dmitlag, was in fact accused of an entirely different crime: the betrayal of Soviet agents during his stay abroad, and this even though he had been specially
commended for his ‘outstanding successes in confidential work’. In reality, however, no rational explanation was called for since, like everyone else in the ‘Firin case’, Firin was doomed because, in April, the great beast himself, Genrikh Iagoda, the previous head of the NKVD and Firin’s superior, had been expelled from the Party and arrested. He would be condemned as an enemy of the people and a spy and traitor to his country in March 1938 in the third show trial. Firin’s downfall led to the downfall of his entire retinue, his court or what passed for it. Another man to be arrested and shot at this time was Igor Terentiev, the Moscow poet and screenwriter, whom Firin had brought to the White Sea Canal to work in a team of campaigners. In one of his interrogations he remarked, ‘I have seen a country that has been transformed into one great camp, with Firin at its head.’60 This was said about a country in which even the builders of the camps could not feel safe from being murdered.

  19

  Year of Adventures, 1937: A Soviet Icarus

  The young Stepan Podlubnyi noted in his diary on 18 March 1938:

  As I pen these lines, large orchestras play over the radio, voices greeting the team on its return after its conquest of the North Pole. They are the first people to have arrived at the Pole and then drifted over 2,000 km to the shores of Greenland. Preparations for a triumphal procession for them are now under way. Papanin (the station leader), Krenkel' (radio operator), Shirshov and Fedorov. An unprecedented fuss is being made about them, supported by all the propaganda tricks of the media. The public is excited; the names of the Papanin team are on everyone’s lips … The artificially generated fuss about the Papanin team, I don’t know, perhaps they deserve it, but it distracts people from thinking politically. The day before yesterday the group around Bukharin, Rykov, Iagoda and Krestinskii were shot. The Papanin team are a splendid device to distract attention from the recent trial and its consequences.1

  For an alert contemporary like Podlubnyi, the son of a Ukrainian ‘kulak’, who had gone underground in Moscow, there was an obvious connection between the enthusiasm for the conquest of the North Pole and the acquiescence in the death sentences passed on representatives of the old Bolshevik leadership. Since 27 May 1937, when the expedition had been deposited at the North Pole, the entire country had followed its progress with bated breath, day by day and week by week, anxiously awaiting news of the polar station drifting southwards on an ice floe. The entire nation knew their names and knew all the details of their background, their development, their personal likes and dislikes, and about Veselyi, the dog accompanying them. Modern technology, the radio and the newspapers had made it possible to follow developments ‘live’.

  However, the Papanin expedition was only the longest expedition of 1937. Between 1932 and 1938, Soviet pilots had set sixty-two world flying records, and the most sensational flights took place in 1937. 1937 was a year of adventures, of advances into hitherto unknown territories, a year of pioneers and lonely heroes on frontiers that the twentieth century was setting out to expand – and not just in Russia. Nowhere perhaps was the yearning and the readiness to overcome the inertia of time and space in one fell swoop greater than in Russia, with all its backwardness – and all this during a year in which the love of adventure coincided with an orgy of killing.2

  Triumphs, records: a city in a fever

  The newspaper reports could easily convey the impression that the return to Moscow and its reflection in the media were at least as important as the launch of the expedition and the expedition itself. ‘The heroes and their families rode in open cars through the city. The houses were festooned with garlands and the air was full of thousands of leaflets bearing greetings.’3 This scene, as described by the pilot and writer Mikhail Vodop'ianov – the Moscow version of the New York ticker-tape parade – was repeated several times in the years 1936–8. Valerii Chkalov describes the return of his team to Moscow in these words:

  It is coming up to 5 a.m. The train is besieged by newspaper correspondents and photographers. Endless questions about America, its technology, its way of life, its traditions. Train stations whizz past. Borisov, Orsha, Smolensk, Viazma. One reception after the other. The night ‘flies past’. It is as if it had not happened at all. Is sleep possible in such a night? The train is rushing towards the capital. We can already see Moscow. The Belorusskii Station. We leave the carriage. Meetings with relatives, friends, acquaintances. Minutes of unforgettable excitement. We exit onto the Station Square. It is packed with people. We ride through the streets of the capital. Thousands of Muscovites so dear to us cheer us on. Red Square …

  The procession came to a halt in the Hall of St George in the Kremlin, where the entire leadership of the party and the state were in attendance.4

  The staging of the return as a triumphal procession through the streets of the capital became a fixed ritual. The route might change – from the Belorusskii Station via Gorky Street to Red Square and the Kremlin, or from the Moscow airports in Shchelkovo, Tushino or Khodynka – but the staging, the images, the sequence of events were all the same once the ritual had been successfully played through the first time. That was to celebrate the dispatching of planes to rescue the team from the Cheliuskin, which had been trapped in the ice and crushed in 1934. On that occasion, the parade of the entire leadership on Red Square was accompanied by newspaper reports and radio broadcasts as the model of triumphant return was tried out with every conceivable extravagance. It was at this time that the title ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ was created, as a way of honouring the achievement of the rescue team of pilots. The arrival in Moscow was merely the finale, the climax of the return home from the frontier, from an adventurous voyage of discovery to the ends of the known world, back to the centre of power and attention. Valerii Chkalov, Georgii Baidukov and Aleksandr Beliakov returned on the Normandy from New York to Paris and from there to the Soviet Union via Berlin. Chkalov gives a detailed account of each stage of the journey: from the mondaine society on the ship, the visit to the International Exhibition and the sight-seeing tour of Lenin’s traces in Paris, from the journey through ‘fascist Berlin’ and the reception in Negoreloe on the Soviet frontier:

  Figure 19.1 The New York-style ticker-tape parade took place for the first time to welcome the return of the members of the Cheliuskin expedition in May 1934.

  ‘The heroes and their families rode in open cars through the city. The houses were festooned with garlands and the air was full of thousands of leaflets bearing greetings.’

  The moon lit up our path. The frontier arch becomes visible. Slowly and solemnly, the train draws near to the Soviet lands. We were standing at the open window. A frontier guard appeared in the corridor. We kiss one another. Each of us embraces him in turn. But the corridor suddenly fills with people and there is no end to the kissing … The train arrives at the capital of Belorussia towards 4 a.m. But the station is ablaze with light. A crowd of thousands is waiting for the train.5

  Six months later, the members of the Papanin expedition received a similar welcome as they arrived in Moscow via Leningrad: ‘When the giant icebreaker came into port at 3.50, covered with flags, all the ships sounded their sirens by way of greeting. Orchestras blared. They were drowned out by a squadron of fighter planes zooming over the harbour.’6

  Each of these reports celebrates the triumph again in recounting it. There were records aplenty to be celebrated, both on land and at sea: speed records, records of heights and distances reached, records of passenger numbers and quantities of freight. 1937 was a year of never-ending ‘firsts’, in which space was conquered in cars, on bicycles, on skis and, above all, by plane. ‘Our pilots break one record after another, and there can be no doubt that we shall smash all world records in the near future.’7

  On 3 August 1936, the pilot Vladimir Kokkinaki flew to a height of 13,110 metres, carrying a cargo of 500 kilograms. On 16 September 1936, Andrei Yumashov flew with 10,000 kilograms to a height of 6,605 metres. The world record distance flight was made in June 1937 by M
ikhail Gromov, a Hero of the Soviet Union, who flew from Moscow to San Jacinto in California. On 27 June 1938, Kokkinaki claimed a new world speed record on his flight from Moscow to Vladivostok – he flew 7,000 kilometres on a single day, at a speed of 307 kilometres an hour. There were not only many technical and structural innovations in aircraft construction, a further novelty was that women took part. In October 1938, for example, Soviet women pilots flew 6,450 kilometres in 26 hours, 29 minutes, and were rewarded with the Gold Star medal of ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’.8

  The other area where records were broken was the far north, the Arctic. As early as 1932, the crew of the Sibiriakov was the first to succeed in negotiating the North-East Passage in one navigation period – between 28 July and 1 October. The Cheliuskin, which had set sail on 12 July 1933 from Leningrad and travelled via Copenhagen and Murmansk, attempted to repeat the North-East Passage in the winter of 1933–4, but found itself trapped in pack ice not far from the Bering Strait. It was so badly damaged that it sank on 13 February 1934. This expedition made history above all because of the dramatic rescue mission by Soviet pilots.9 On 3 August 1935, Sigismund Levanevskii, Georgii Baidukov and Vasilii Levchenko started out on their attempt to set a long-distance world record – from Moscow to San Francisco via the North Pole. However, the flight had to be abandoned because of technical problems.10 The second attempt at breaking the long-distance world flying record, this time over Soviet territory, was crowned with success. On 20 July 1936, Valerii Chkalov, Georgii Baidukov and Aleksandr Beliakov took the ‘Stalin route’, i.e. the route from Moscow via Victoria Island, Franz Josef Land and Severnaia Zemlia to Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula and striking south from there to Khabarovsk and Udd Island [now renamed Chkalov in the latter’s honour – Trans.]. They flew the 9,374 kilometres in 56 hours and 20 minutes in an ANT-25. On the return flight they gave an account of their journey wherever they touched down, spoke at receptions, and thus added to the excitement and the hunger for new records that was sweeping the country. They arrived back in Moscow on 10 August 1936, and there they were welcomed by Stalin in person on the Shchelkovo airfield. Tens of thousands lined the streets leading to the centre of the city, and a mass rally in Gorky Park was attended by 20,000 workers from the aircraft industry, prominent politicians, building workers and engineers. On 18 August 1936, there were celebrations in honour of the ‘Day of Aviation’, though a mere two days later the headlines changed dramatically. On 20 August 1936, the show trial against the ‘Trotskyite band of murderers’ began. Only a few weeks after Mikhail Gromov’s return from his long-distance flight to California, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev – the ANT series of planes was named after him – was arrested (in October 1937) and was condemned to spend several years in a special camp, the ‘Aviation Gulag’ (Leonid Kerber).11 The age of the great triumphs of Soviet aviation and polar exploration coincided with the witch hunt against engineers, technicians and designers. As Sergei Korolev, another pioneer of space and air travel, put it, no one is immune from the judgement of Nemesis; he might be solving differential equations one day but still be sent to Kolyma the next.12 Aviation was particularly susceptible to the standard accusations of 1937, ‘sabotage’ and ‘wrecking’, because it was still in its initial, pioneering phase, with all the attendant test flights, technical problems and accidents.