Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  A mere forty-eight hours after census day, and Yuri knows he has been right to worry. The population figure will fall well short of Stalin’s minimum. But as bad as this is, it is not the only concern. On the census forms, unambiguously defiant, citizens in their millions have described themselves as Christian. (And whose decision was it to include a question about religious belief?) There’s the population problem and the religion problem, but equally shocking is that the census has given voice to the disgruntled whispers that have rustled through Soviet life for so long: in the margins of the census forms citizens have vented their discontent. Complaints and insults, anger and criticisms dirty the perfect results that Stalin requires — the perfect results the enumerators should have elicited. The census is a disaster. The people higher up are informed. No one wants to tell Stalin, no one wants to be the bearer of such news. But of course he must be told.

  The All-Union Census of 1937 is immediately buried. Over the next several months the data is collected in secret, analysed in secret, and locked away.

  ‘Why bother to keep it at all?’ Vera whispers to Yuri, one morning, in menacing 2.00 a.m. wakefulness.

  Yuri shrugs. ‘Perhaps Stalin has another use for it. Or perhaps he’ll prove the people don’t know what’s good for them. Perhaps he has plans to discredit the census with a follow-up study.’ None of which Yuri believes; he’s a mathematician, he knows the results are correct. It’s impossible to predict the General Secretary’s actions, but what is beyond doubt is that the data as it now stands undermines the Great Leader’s work.

  While the census data is analysed and stored where no one can see or destroy it, those who have worked on it, particularly those in positions of responsibility, are far more exposed. The repercussions are felt almost immediately. In the first weeks after the census, several workers in Yuri’s division disappear. He is surprised at the choice of these targets.

  ‘They were middle-level,’ he says to Vera. ‘None was involved in the framing of the census.’

  ‘But perhaps they were among the first to identify a problem with the results.’

  It’s another long night, Mikhail and Lidiya are asleep. Yuri and Vera are huddled together by the stove, trying to find patterns, reasons, explanations — not that reason has ever enjoyed top billing in explaining the workings of the Soviet leadership. Outside, winter rages. The window rattles, the wind howls, ice dashes against the glass.

  ‘These are only the first arrests,’ Yuri says softly.

  The dark days grind on. Yuri is desperate to sever ties with the census and return to his old demography work. But without permission — and he won’t ask, won’t draw attention to himself — he must remain where he is. As one of the senior officers on the census, it is his task to apportion the questions to be analysed. It has come down from on high that if each analyst sees only one question, they’ll remain ignorant of the general thrust of the results. This is nonsense, but nonetheless Yuri, like everyone else, plays his part in the deception. The work is cloaked in secrecy; all those employed are aware that even a whisper could jeopardise not simply their livelihood, but their life. People are being arrested all the time, and as one of the leaders both in the planning and the analysis of the census, Yuri knows it’s only a matter of time before they come for him.

  Whether at home or at work, these are perilous days. Yuri and Vera are watchful on the stairs, they’re watchful in the street, they’re watchful on trams and buses. Out in public, their conversation is empty; in shops, where informers are rife, they’re silent. Even where they believe themselves to be safe, they speak in whispers. Their voices became more and more hushed as the days stretch out of winter.

  The essence of terror, the terror of terror, is helplessness. Yuri and Vera know there’s a disaster heading their way and there is nothing they can do to stop it. The NKVD always comes at night. Yuri and Vera hardly sleep anymore, and when they do, they never properly undress. Just that week, Vera packed the winter bedding away in the trunk. The bed is strangely flat, their own bodies making only the slightest mounds.

  ‘It’s not just me in the firing line.’

  Yuri is warning Vera — not that she needs reminding — that when one member of a family is taken, others are likely to follow. It’s the price exacted by the state, and the cost of the better future. Vera is not one of those disenchanted Bolsheviks who cast a sentimental and distorting gaze back to the czars. But this, she says, what they have now, is not how it was supposed to be.

  Lidiya feels the tension at home. Her mother is nervy, and her father, whom she hardly saw during the busy months leading up to the census, is now home every evening, often earlier than her mother. She watches him sitting in his armchair, a book face-down on his knee, his forehead crinkled with worries. She wishes she could think of something to make him feel better. Her brother seems unaware that anything is wrong; he is full of the Komsomol. He talks incessantly of new friends and experiences, the drills and exercises; he boasts that Komsomol members are being recruited to hand out flyers and put up posters; they’re even being used for crowd control. He says Komsomol members are told to keep their eyes and ears open; enemies of the people, he says, are everywhere. None of these tasks appeals to Lidiya, and she hopes that by the time she reaches Komsomol age the tasks will have changed. Misha spends less and less time at home; sometimes he stays away all night. ‘On Komsomol business,’ he says.

  Like all Soviet children, Lidiya knows about Pavlik, the most famous Pioneer of all. A few years earlier, Pavlik and his younger brother were murdered by kulaks. After the deaths, it emerged that Pavlik had informed on his own father. Pavlik not only became a martyr to the great Bolshevik cause, but he was held up as a model for all children, a boy who was such a good Pioneer that he put his country ahead of his father.

  Lidiya would never do as Pavlik did. Always she will be child to her parents first and a Pioneer or Komsomol member second; she cannot imagine a life without her mother and father. She is sure her brother holds a different view. Increasingly these days, Misha makes her uneasy, and she is relieved when he is not at home.

  It is a mild night in mid-May when they come for Yuri Kogan. The air is still, the sky brilliant with stars, the moon a delicate sliver. Two vehicles pull up in the street. The stutter and burr of the dying engines is loud in the tranquil night. In the kommunalka everyone hears, everyone fears, for in the tumultuous times of 1937 this is not the first time the NKVD has come. Once, the Kogans might have felt safe in the knowledge that those who were taken must have erred in some way, but that was before the census.

  Yuri and Vera are not asleep, they hear the cars in the street. As doors slam, and rough voices rise through the calm night air, they leap out of bed. They pull on their shoes — they’re already dressed — and wake Lidiya. She requires no explanation and quickly dresses herself. They hear voices and the clatter of boots on the stairs. Misha is already dressed; he’s standing at attention in full view of anyone entering the room. The footsteps stop; they’ve reached the third floor. Vera takes Lidiya by the hand, and they stand together in front of the window in a direct line to the door. Yuri positions himself on her other side and calls to his son. Misha doesn’t move; he holds himself apart from the family. All four of them stare at the door. The steps draw closer. The boots stop. Fists strike the wood.

  Lidiya has only just turned nine, but for the rest of her life she’ll remember every detail of that terrible night, lodged in her mind as a series of discrete snapshots. There are five men standing in a semicircle around the open door. Three take charge of her father, three huge men to escort her papochka to goodness knows where. The other two will remain to collect evidence.

  Her father is protesting, his voice shaky. ‘I’m a member of the party, I work for the party. I believe in our great Motherland. The General Secretary has my loyalty. I love Comrade Stalin. I’ve done nothing wrong. There’s been a mistake.’

&n
bsp; Lidiya wants to run to him, hold on to him, drag him away from these men. She believes her father, he never lies. But the men are unmoved. ‘The party doesn’t make mistakes,’ one of them says, using exactly the same words she’s heard from her father’s lips.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ he says again, reaching for Vera’s hand. Her mother doesn’t need to be told. She knows, like Lidiya knows, but it makes no difference to the officers.

  Her parents kiss, her father’s hand strokes her mother’s cheek. He then turns to her. He lifts her up and holds her tight; his cheek is rough, he smells of tobacco and bedtime. And if she’d known this would be the last time she would ever see her father, would she have held on longer? Asked for some special words, or offered him some of her own? Snuggled into his neck so as never to forget the feel of him? The regrets will come later, but for now everything is smothered in fear and hope. Her father puts her down and approaches Misha to embrace him. Misha stops him with an outstretched arm. Her brother does not smile, he does not speak, his gaze flits to the watching officers, he wants them to notice.

  Her father certainly does. He shakes his head slowly, and looks very sad. He turns to her mother. ‘I’ll be back soon. The party knows I’ve done nothing wrong.’

  The big men hustle him through the door. ‘A mistake has been made,’ he says from the passage.

  The two remaining men ransack the Kogan home. They pull books from shelves, and clothes from racks; they haul cartons from the high compartments, and drag bags from cupboards; they break bowls and plates, they toss ornaments aside. The floor disappears beneath the wreckage. And through it all, her mother is saying: there’s nothing to find, we are good Soviet citizens, we are party members.

  They have a sack into which they put books and papers; in another sack they put the valuables: a kiddush cup studded with colourful stones, a small brass menorah that belonged to Vera’s parents, Yuri’s new boots, Vera’s amber ring, Lidiya’s doll. They pick up Mikhail’s soccer ball, but after glancing at the stern, silent boy, they put it down again. They take and take, and at last they leave.

  There is laughter as they clatter down the stairs. There’s laughter as they enter the street. Lidiya stands at one side of the window, hidden by the curtain. She sees the light from their torches leaping and dancing across the building opposite; she doesn’t understand how torchlight can be so scary. She sees the men toss one sack into the back of the car and take the other into the front. She sees quite clearly the Kogan family kiddush cup: while one man holds the torch, the other tries to prise the stones loose.

  The car won’t start. The coughs and complaints of the protesting motor rise high above the street and enter the despoiled space of Kogan family life. There are raised voices and curses, and more spluttering from the car engine. In the end the men are forced to push-start the car. At the street corner the engine kicks over, they jump into their seats, slam the doors, and disappear.

  Every morning for the next three weeks, Vera Kogan goes to the Big House with provisions for her husband and questions for any official who will speak to her. The queue is long, some days she does not reach the top of the line. She will never know if Yuri receives her parcels. Every evening and long into the night, she calls on friends and colleagues of her husband, most of whom are reluctant to speak to her, much less offer help. Vera writes letters to party officials, she writes to the local Soviet deputy, she writes several times to Stalin himself. At the same time, knowing that she, too, could be arrested, she needs to make plans to keep her children safe.

  Misha wants nothing to do with his father’s arrest. At fifteen, he might still be a child to his mother, but this is a boy who stubbornly knows his own mind. The morning after Yuri is taken, Misha slips out of the flat carrying a box of possessions. He leaves a note for Vera — not to allay her anxiety, so Lidiya will come to believe, but to stop her from attempting to find him. He writes that he will be staying with Komsomol friends, older fellows who will see to his welfare.

  As always, Lidiya takes a different approach. She tries to reassure her mother with hugs and soothing words, she stands in line at shops, she helps prepare their meals. The other women who share the kitchen assiduously ignore both mother and daughter. They have their own families to protect.

  Lidiya might well be old beyond her years, but at nine years of age she still needs looking after. Vera goes to see Marya, an old friend of her own mother. There are no grandparents, she explains. Nothing stands between the children and an orphanage if Vera is arrested. Neither she nor Yuri are enemies of the people so they should be released within a short time. While she says this without hesitation, she knows nothing is certain in these precarious times.

  Marya needs no convincing. She packs a bag, and moves in with Vera and Lidiya. Should they come for Vera, it will be Marya, born more than sixty years earlier, a woman of the old school who secretly believes that despite the greatness of Lenin and Stalin, God in Heaven is far greater, who will look after Lidiya — and Mikhail, too, should he return.

  Another night, and more boots in the passage, this time marching towards Vera. They check Marya’s passport and push her aside; they glance at Lidiya and push her aside too. It’s Vera they want. Two men take her away; two others remain for a perfunctory search. When they’ve finished, they pause in the open doorway, turn to face Marya and Lidiya, make a threatening gesture, and leave.

  Mikhail does not return. Neither does Vera nor Yuri. It’s just Marya and Lidiya alone in the rooms at the kommunalka. Later, Lidiya will discover that her father was shot within days of his arrest. Her mother takes longer to die in the freezing plains of a Siberian labour camp. The official cause of her death is tuberculosis. It is more acceptable than exposure and starvation.

  Four months after both parents are taken, nine packages addressed to Yuri in Vera’s handwriting are delivered to the kommunalka. These are the parcels left by Vera at the Big House to be passed on to her husband; the fresh food has been removed, and each parcel neatly resealed. The return of the parcels is code that Yuri is dead. The sick irony of this occurs to Lidiya only when she is older: that here is a regime which commits murder as frequently and as inconsequentially as an eye-blink, but could never be accused of petty theft.

  In these days of terror, it is common to see grandmothers caring for young children. These poor mites suffering the loss of their parents are now forced to hide their grief, for the taint of parents condemned as enemies of the people flows through to the children. Marya instructs Lidiya that if asked about Vera and Yuri, she is to say they are away, doing important work for the Soviet republics. Lidiya has to appear happy, she must behave as if the parents she loves have not disappeared, she must stifle her great sorrow.

  There come to be two epochs for Lidiya: the time before her parents are taken and the time after. In the new era, her parents are gone, her brother is gone, food shrinks to kasha and cabbage, clothes are patched, and shoes are improvised. And who does she blame? She blames Stalin, ‘the best friend to all children’, and she will never forgive him.

  There is no hope. Forced to live her life in the negative, Lidiya nonetheless attends school, she does her lessons, she plays with her classmates. She does exactly what is expected of her as if nothing has changed, as if her days are not scarred by loss.

  ‘We have to be careful,’ Marya says, as she cuddles the child in her ancient arms and promises never to leave her.

  And although Lidiya wants her mother, wants her so badly that her whole body hurts, she knows she has to be brave, she has to be grown up.

  It has been decided.

  Twenty-two years later, Lidiya herself became mother to a daughter. She looked down at the infant and swore she would protect her from all harm. For the first decade of Galina’s life, Lidiya never spoke of her own parents, and for the next decade only sparingly: she was determined to spare her daughter the penalties of a spoiled biography. By the time of Brezhnev
’s funeral and the glimpse of Mikhail, Galina was no longer a child, and what little faith in the Soviet system remained to Lidiya after her parents were taken was killed off during the war. There was such inhuman suffering when Leningrad was under siege, such neglect from the central authorities, that Lidiya emerged from those nine hundred days decanted of any patriotism or desire for it. So when Mikhail appeared on the TV displaying the rewards of a life without a spoiled biography, Lidiya broke her silence.

  By the time Galina left the Soviet Union, the story of her mother’s family had been told and retold. She had stored it in the safest chamber of memory, where it lay with a strange and quiet volatility. Through the many retellings, her mother’s history, so powerful and vivid, had become her history: the threat of those times, the fear, the terrible loss of a mother and a father, the shocking betrayal of a son and brother. And she, too, had come to hate Mikhail.

  The story had expanded since Galina had come to Australia with all she had read about Soviet Russia. She’d been appalled to learn what the great revolution had cost the Russian people — the deliberate starvation of entire communities, the millions of deaths, the lies of the leaders. It was like suddenly discovering that a parent or a sibling, someone very close to you, was a vicious killer. And even if only a fraction of the claims were true, Soviet society had been, and probably remained, monstrously cruel, and Soviet leaders possessed of as little regard for its citizens as the wind had for the clouds it pushed around. She used to believe that in order to remain sane in a repressive regime, memory was forced to discard what it simply could not bear to hold. But the fact was, her own mother and people like her did not forget. Perhaps forgetting was the exclusive prerogative of the perpetrators, providing them with a well-oiled gateway to a guiltless future.