Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  In the years to come, Soviet lifetimes will prove precariously short. But for the moment, everyday life has improved for the Kogans. Yuri holds a senior post at ZAGS, and Vera is working at the new Institute of Languages; like other party members, their positions appear to be secure. Best of all, they have been given a place of their own. In a building not far from Yuri’s parents, they have been allocated what they regard as two rooms, but because the partition separating the two areas does not reach the ceiling, officially the space is designated as a single room. Two for the price of one, they joke. Within the rooms they have partitioned off smaller spaces, using bookcases and other furniture. The kitchen down one end of the passage, and the bathroom and toilet down the other are shared with only three other families, all of whom appear to be good and friendly folk. The wallpaper is only lightly marked, the burzhuika burns well, and their window faces south. And while there are ancient stains stretched like stormy clouds across the ceiling, it is a negligible failing when everything else is so favourable.

  Perhaps because of Lidiya’s shaky start in life, or perhaps because Vera is more confident with a second child, she raises Lidiya differently from Mikhail. Despite the party’s insistence on exactly five feeds per twenty-four-hour period, Vera feeds Lidiya whenever she thinks she’s hungry; she picks her up whenever she cries, and she lavishes cuddles and kisses on her even though the party forbids such behaviour as unhygienic. Vera ignores practically all the party stipulations regarding the emotional hygiene of the Soviet baby.

  ‘I’m the mother,’ she says to Yuri. ‘I know what’s best for our child.’

  In all other respects, however, she and Yuri remain good party members, though not without their concerns — different concerns now for these different times. Enemies of the people exist in what seem to be extraordinary numbers: priests, kulaks, bourgeois elements of all kinds. And despite what the party says, food shortages are worse than ever. Many is the night when Yuri and Vera go to sleep hungry, and they know their circumstances are better than most. When their doubts intrude too loudly, they have to remind themselves they are making history, that nothing like the Bolshevik state has existed before, and with so much needing to change, of course there will be occasional setbacks.

  Huge posters adorn the streets and buildings. Some warn against enemies of the people, others depict industrious workers with complex machinery, most display the greatness and goodness of Stalin. A large number of the posters portray happy workers on collective farms, with lush fields of grain, carts laden with vegetables, and animals fatted for eating. So much produce in the posters, so little food in the shops.

  Vera and Yuri know that as educated people and party members, they are not the target population for the posters: they don’t need convincing of the necessity for change. But still there are many that give them pause.

  ‘These posters, they’re so —’ Vera searches for the right word.

  ‘Banal?’ suggests Yuri.

  ‘No.’ She is shaking her head slowly. ‘Not banal. They’re exaggerated. They push the point too hard. They’re verging on the comical, the absurd.’

  They’ve stopped in front of a poster they’ve not seen before, although at five below with a fierce wind raging they’ll not be stopping long. The poster seems more incongruous because the main figure, a happy boy of twelve or thirteen, is wearing short pants and a light shirt. This smug, summery youth fills half the poster. The other half is taken up by eight male heads, eight villains with evil expressions, each wearing a distinctive and readily identifiable hat. Among these enemies of the people are a monarchist, a capitalist, a Menshevik, and an anti-Bolshevik general. The caption reads: ‘It is a happy citizen who is acquainted with these types only from books.’

  ‘It’s no different from a cartoon,’ Vera says.

  ‘Exactly, and that’s why it’ll reach a good many Russians. It’s clear and simple and strongly pictorial.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ Vera says, adjusting her scarf and hat so only her eyes behind her spectacles are visible. ‘What appeals to many Russians does not to us.’

  ‘Us?’

  She has moved to another poster. It portrays an assortment of happy, healthy workers: miners, industrial workers, farm labourers. Presiding over the group is a proud, paternal Stalin.

  ‘Where are we?’ Vera says, nodding at the poster. ‘Where are the intellectuals?’

  Yuri moves closer, his arm presses against hers. ‘I don’t think that pictures of solemn, bespectacled men and women huddled over books would provide the right impression of our revolution,’ he says quietly.

  Vera removes her own fogged-up glasses, rubs them with a gloved thumb and replaces them. She peers more closely at the poster.

  ‘We’re never in the pictures.’

  ‘Does that matter? After all, we don’t need convincing.’

  ‘But we’re workers too.’

  ‘These poster people represent an ideal, something for ordinary citizens to strive for during these unsettling times.’

  ‘So these happy Soviet citizens,’ Vera points at the poster, ‘they don’t really exist?’

  ‘Hush,’ Yuri hisses. ‘Hush.’ He grabs the offending hand, and pulls her away.

  Collectivisation is the centrepiece of Stalin’s five-year plan: huge farms with new equipment for more efficient production and greater yields. No one would challenge the benefits, but the implementation is testing the entire country. Stories of rich kulaks abound: their illegal trading and private ownership, their hoarding of grain that rightfully belongs to all the people, their refusal to work for the common good. These rich peasants are being rooted out and imprisoned, their land and livestock confiscated. Many have been executed.

  Six months later, Yuri and Vera are standing in front of another poster, this one displayed outside a bakery. The corners have curled and the colours have been blanched by flour and sunlight, but the picture remains very striking. Most of the poster is taken up with a gargantuan female farm-worker painted in shades of red, and carrying a rake in her right hand. Her other hand is stretched out in warning, a stay-away gesture to a priest and two kulaks — three tiny grey figures who scarcely come up to her knees. The caption reads, ‘There is no room in our collective farm for priests and kulaks.’

  ‘There seem to be so many of them,’ Vera says to Yuri. ‘Not priests, but kulaks. How can there be so many rich peasants and all of them enemies of the people?’

  Yuri hushes her, as he needs to do increasingly in these testing days. But as reports multiply of the huge numbers of kulaks arrested for wrongdoing, it is hard not to question.

  As for the good peasants, there are shocking rumours: millions of them have died of starvation, and entire communities have been wiped out. There is a scattering of ghost villages across the land.

  ‘Not even the old aristocracy with all their greed and violence could claim such high casualties,’ Vera says.

  The political leaders talk of the need to bear hardships now for the better future ahead. But as the number of dead mount, the cost exacted by the future seems shockingly high.

  And yet it seems the leaders are right again. By the mid-1930s, after the hard years of collectivisation and the worst famine in living memory, the scaffolding of the new Soviet state is in place. The people are told of huge productive farms in the countryside, and of large-scale industrialisation in the cities. They hear of the successes blared through loudspeakers, they read about them in newspapers, they see them emblazoned across posters. The leader’s speeches are full of them. And they also hear that the whole world is watching the Soviet Union, that proletarians across the globe are uniting, that International Socialism will soon be realised. With so much at stake, it comes as no surprise to Yuri and Vera that Stalin orders the All-Union Population Census. Stalin wants hard proof of his successes.

  Yuri and Vera should be gratified that their lon
g-held ideals have finally been realised. But — and they could never have predicted this — they are no longer the confident revolutionaries they once were. They haven’t lost their faith in socialist principles, but they can’t, like many of their neighbours and colleagues, ignore the contradictions. There are power failures and gas leaks, they ride to work in rickety trams, people are cold and hungry, shops are empty of goods, tuberculosis is rampant, school-aged children wander the streets, and drunk men lie slumped in doorways.

  ‘They’re twisting the language to make us believe lies,’ Vera says to Yuri at the end of another weary day.

  The Kogans have finished their dinner. The dishes from their meal are stacked up ready to be taken to the kitchen for washing; Lidiya is reading and Mikhail is doing puzzles. With the children close by, Vera keeps her voice low.

  ‘They’re lying to us, Yuri. We’re told that happiness is living in the Soviet Union under the protection of our great leader Stalin. But look at the reality.’ She takes a deep breath, and the words pour out of her. ‘We live in a room with four people and share a bathroom with fourteen. It’s been months since we last saw a piece of fruit. Our shoes are reinforced with cardboard and our socks are a tangle of darning. The electricity is unreliable; for hours at a time we’re reduced to using candles, and the supply of candles invariably falls short of the demand. In the battle between a heated building and the freezing months of winter, it’s the winter that always wins. The faucet in the bathroom has been broken for six months, and there’s no indication it’ll be fixed any time soon. I’ve spent a fair percentage of the past year queuing for goods that have often disappeared by the time I reach the top of the line. No matter that we feel demoralised and miserable, this, according to our great Soviet leaders, is happiness.’

  Yuri is about to speak, to placate his wife. But Vera is not finished.

  ‘I’ve no complaint against the Department for Agitation and Propaganda. After all, there’s nothing wrong with persuasion, not when the message is right. But what if persuasion takes a form that obfuscates the truth? Even deliberately deceives?’

  Snow is still on the ground, the river is still under ice, and heaped across the river’s frozen surface and creating a weird, other-worldly vista are icy hillocks now grey in the grimy air. The cityscape remains locked in winter, but already the days are longer, and at seven o’clock it is light outside. Yuri twists around and pulls the curtain across the window.

  Vera is speaking quietly, but her distress is quite clear. ‘How would we know?’ she continues. ‘After all, if propaganda is effective you don’t recognise you’re in its grip.’

  He shakes his head slowly, he has no more answers than does Vera. What they both do know is to keep their doubts to themselves. There are spies at work, spies in the kitchen, spies on the stairs, spies on the trolley bus, spies in the shop queues. People denounce others before they themselves are denounced. People denounce in order to prove their loyalty.

  Yuri, like so many mathematicians, is recruited to work on the All-Union Population Census. In what appears to be grand work for the society he has long believed in, he buries his small doubts, and he’s determined to convince Vera to do the same with her larger ones. He tells her that the census, ordered by Stalin himself, will prove the success of the revolution.

  Throughout 1936, Yuri is absent from Leningrad for weeks at a time, working in Moscow with other mathematicians and social scientists preparing the census. This huge enterprise, they are told, will be a triumph for socialism: it will reveal the extent to which living standards have improved, it will provide scientific proof of the success of Stalin’s reforms, and it will boost the people’s faith in the revolutionary project. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have been recruited for this mammoth national undertaking.

  After one sojourn in Moscow, Yuri returns home full of excitement. ‘I’ve seen Stalin’s handwriting,’ he tells Vera and the children. ‘Corrections, in his own hand, on one of the drafts of the census. That’s how committed he is to this project. Our General Secretary takes time out of his busy schedule to edit the questions.’

  It is summer. The days stretch long into the night, the Leningrad winds are softer, and according to Yuri, there’s a mood of optimism throughout the country. He is convinced that Stalin would not be putting so much faith in the census unless he knew it would prove the success of his reforms.

  ‘If he knows so much,’ Vera the pragmatist says, ‘then why do we need a national census at all?’

  Yuri laughs. ‘Hard data is better than hearsay. And besides, there are foreigners to convince. Communism is for the world, not just for Russia.’

  Vera is not laughing. ‘You’re sounding like a sloganeer yourself.’

  Misha glares at his mother. What would she know about the real Russia? What would she know about anything, holed up at her institute with her students and her translations? He’s proud of his father’s work. His father is working for Comrade Stalin, and when he’s older he, Mikhail Yuryevich Kogan, will work for Comrade Stalin too. In the meantime, he’s determined to be the first of his Pioneers group to be invited to join the Komsomol, and then, in another couple of years … well, he has plans.

  Not that he’s been unhappy as a Pioneer. He’s loved the rules and rituals, the games and other activities, and best of all he’s loved being part of the struggle to liberate the labouring classes of the world. A year ago, in probably his greatest triumph during his time as a Pioneer, he was promoted to events secretary at the Pioneer Palace. This would have been an honour wherever it might have happened, but everyone knows that the Leningrad Pioneer Palace is the best in all of the Soviet Union. Their palace really is a palace, the former Anichkov Palace, where the last czar was born.

  Within a few months and not long before census day Mikhail is a new member of the Komsomol. He puts himself forward for every task, he can’t do too much — although he needs to be careful, there are whispers, jibes, about the young, pushy Jew. Not that he’s aware, he’s happier than he’s ever been. He plans to take on leadership responsibilities at the first opportunity, and while he is not in the top academic level at school, he consoles himself with the thought that Stalin wasn’t a top student either while the traitor Trotsky was. Mikhail is planning his future. Stalin has surrounded himself with powerful people, many of whom have been drawn from the military or the NKVD, so there’s much to recommend both options. Most of his friends want to be mechanical engineers attached to industry, or construction engineers involved in Stalin’s massive building projects, but Mikhail wants a bigger canvas: he wants to take part in shaping the entire country.

  Lidiya has been a member of the Octobrists since she was seven. She doesn’t want to recite the rhymes they’re forced to learn, she doesn’t care for the games they’re told to play, and she doesn’t like the songs that make up the Octobrist musical canon. She says it’s all too childish. With another eighteen months before she’s old enough for the Pioneers, she is refusing to attend her Octobrist group. While Vera, more than Yuri, has some sympathy for her daughter’s position, she knows there’s no place for defiance or independence in today’s Russia.

  ‘How can our children be so different?’ she says to Yuri one evening after a particularly trying day with Lidiya. ‘Misha could be a poster boy for Soviet youth.’ She sees Yuri is about to interrupt, and quickly continues. ‘He’ll be fine, he wants to fit in, he wants to do everything his country tells him. It’s far more difficult for our daughter, with a mind of her own and an imagination that owes more to Krylov and H.G. Wells — ’

  And now Yuri does interrupt. ‘Our eight-year-old daughter is reading H.G. Wells?’

  Vera laughs. ‘Not yet, but it won’t be long. She took my English copy of The Time Machine from the shelf and was curious about the script. After I explained about Cyrillic and Latin scripts, she wanted me to tell her the story of the novel.’ Vera shrugs. ‘What could I do?’
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  Census day is now just weeks away. Everything is in place. Printing presses across the nation are clacking away, and forms are stacked and packed, ready to be sent to far-flung regions. An army of enumerators has been trained to conduct the census, tens of thousands of staff have been recruited to tabulate the answers, and hundreds of statisticians are on hand to analyse the data. Everything is running to schedule, yet now Yuri is worried. He’s more worried than he’s ever been.

  The problem is Stalin — not that Yuri voices this to anyone other than Vera, and even then the words feel like traitors in his mouth. Stalin has made it very clear that he expects the census to portray a citizenry whose belief in the revolution is rock-solid. It will show that no one wants or needs religion anymore; indeed, so convinced is Stalin of the success of the campaign against Russian Orthodoxy, he’s insisted that a question about religious affiliation be included for the first time on a national census. Stalin also expects the population of Russia and the Soviet Republics to come in at an absolute minimum of one hundred and seventy million — he actually expects it to be much higher. The population figure is, he says, of the utmost importance. It will provide hard evidence of improved diet and living conditions, as well as better health services and housing; it will reveal an increase in the birth rate and a decrease in the infant mortality rate, and, most importantly, it will demonstrate the success of collectivisation and industrialisation, his signature policies.

  Yuri has done some preliminary figures based on the 1926 census, and there is good reason to worry. If there had been no campaign against the kulaks, if there had been fewer enemies of the people, if instead of famine and cholera there really had been better housing and hygiene, it is possible the population might stretch to one hundred and sixty-seven million — still short of what Stalin expects. And with disease, overcrowding and sanitary conditions as bad as ever, Yuri fears there will actually be increases in infant and child deaths, and a seriously blighted birth rate. The scientist in him welcomes the census to set matters straight, but the Russian in him tells him that the science of the All-Union Census has acquired a political agenda.