Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  In one of the battered blocks, we found Tatiana scrubbing crayfish in a red and white polka-dot kitchen. There were crayfish everywhere: in a bucket on the floor, crawling along the sideboard; boiling on the stove, steaming in a pink pile on the table. Tatiana was young, with large gray eyes, full lips, and wavy, ash-blonde hair. “I hope you like crayfish,” she said shyly, standing on one leg, wrapped in an apron, unconscious of her beauty. “There’s nothing much else to eat. Some boys were selling them by the roadside and Misha bought a sackful.”

  She and Misha had come to Marx to serve out their obligatory provincial stint after graduating as engineers from Moscow’s elite Baumann Institute. Marx’s secret electronics factory used to employ five hundred engineers to work on the electronics for Saratov’s arms factories. It was deemed a prestigious placement. So hush-hush was its operation that even its workers did not know the factory’s real name. They turned out toy cars, too, to give the factory an alibi. Now the bright young engineers like Misha and Tatiana had left, and toys were all the factory was making. Those who remained earned a token amount, when they were paid at all. Tatiana was happy that Misha was earning enough for her to be able to stay at home and look after their daughter, Polina.

  Presently, Misha walked in, pink and dripping, straight off the soccer field. Star of the factory’s team, he was putting on weight now. He was fair, like his wife, with blue eyes and a gentle face which lit up when he smiled. Natasha had described him to me as “the only honest businessman in Marx.” When I told him he laughed. “Honest? Not me! Well, it depends what you mean. I don’t stick to the law—no one could. But in the sense of being decent, I try.”

  What Natasha meant by saying that Misha and his partners were honest was that they had not set up their business by stealing from the state. Those who could did so by paying some factory manager to “borrow” his employees’ wages for a month or two. The workers went unpaid, but another business was born. Misha kick-started his business by driving to southern Russia, where Tatiana’s mother worked in a sugar factory, filling the car with sugar, and selling it in Saratov. Now they traded in soft drinks and chewing gum. Though the family lived modestly enough, unlike most people they could eat fresh food every day, and treat their friends.

  Misha was shy with me. But as the liqueur bottle grew emptier, he relaxed: “I know you think we’re just traders in cheap goods, but you wait! I’m going to knock out my rivals. I’m going to be a power in this province. We may have started by lying and stealing from the government—there was no other way. But we’ll soon be beyond that. Even now things are sorting themselves out. And there’ll be no stopping the people who come through these years. We’re going to be fabulously rich.”

  Misha’s words were addressed to me, but his eyes stayed on his graceful wife as she moved around the kitchen. “Only then will we get around to tackling the chaos you see all around you. Mark my words, the West’ll have to watch out! Who’d be a businessman in the West? They’re going mad with boredom—you’ve got a system. Where’s the fun? Here you build your own world every day. It’s a game of skill, and there are no rules, just ways of getting through. We may have lived under a regime where the more water you poured onto your fields, the more subsidy you received, but that’s over. Now we count every kopeck. For me every other trader in town’s a competitor—I’ll do the lot in! It’s tough, but fun! We’re going to turn Russia around!”

  Later, when I went to stay with them, I would watch Misha leap into his little Zhiguli each morning as if throwing himself into the saddle, and drive off in a cloud of dust to his own Wild West. He talked little about the risks he was running, even to Tatiana. But she overheard the whispered late-night phone calls. She saw how he was ruining his health, how he twitched, talked in his sleep, and woke stare-eyed with fear. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand it,” he muttered one morning at breakfast. “My nerves are shot. The games we have to play, day in, day out, to stay out of the clutches of the police; hiding in ditches, paying them off. Everyone talks about the mafia, but the government are the real racketeers. You can come to an arrangement with the mafia, if you know how to talk to them.”

  Misha was born in Ukraine, into a peasant family. His parents survived the great famines that killed some five to eight million Ukrainians—no one even knew how many. His father, badly wounded in the war, lay concussed for six months. Only because his officers valued him was he, an ordinary soldier, given the precious American drugs that saved him. After that he was sent to the camps on some trumped-up charge. Through all this he remained a man of great sweetness, Tatiana said. Misha had inherited that quality. How indeed was he going to survive in the jungle of Russian business?

  Tatiana had an inner poise that set her apart from the anxious strivings of her husband and friends. Her pale beauty was typical of her father’s people, the Mordvins, a Finno-Ugric minority who had lived on the River Volga since long before the Slavs settled the steppes. For a beautiful young woman, she was curiously lacking in vanity. At school, she was said to have been so ugly that the other children kept their distance, calling her “Sergievna,” “Sergei’s daughter.” Through hard work she won a place at Moscow’s Baumann Institute. Once there she grew her hair, changed her image, and fell in love with another scholarship kid from the sticks, Misha.

  Staying with her, I began to appreciate how looking after a small family could occupy all her time. In theory, Marx had running water, gas, and electricity. But in practice, one or other and sometimes all three were turned off for periods every day. Keys were another problem: there was nowhere in town to get one cut, so Tatiana had the only key. The family appeared to live with all “mod cons,” but there was nothing modern or convenient about their lives. Their washing machine had not worked for five years, the man who came to mend it having walked off with a broken part and never returned. The town had a launderette, but it was a long way away and it tore clothes to shreds. So, like everyone else, Tatiana washed the family’s clothes by hand. As for the telephone, since Misha was earning reasonable money, they jumped the five-year queue to get one installed. But you could use it only for local calls. For all others, you had to walk half an hour to the main post office. There, you booked and paid for the call, returned home, and waited until the manually operated switchboard chose to put you through.

  When I first came to Marx I was surprised to find educated people sleeping on broken sofas, keeping their baths full of water, using cupboards without handles, and eating cold spaghetti. Now, watching Tatiana struggling with the pointless trials of everyday life, I appreciated how hard it was to bring up a family without taking to the bottle, or sinking into a depression. Sanity required that you did only the minimum to keep life going.

  • • •

  Just before I arrived, the balconies fell off an entire block of flats while the owners were asleep in their beds. As the town fell ever further into disrepair, the future, too, was retreating.

  CONNOISSEUR OF SILENCES

  All this time, the person I was most anxious to get to know was the awkward, brave, poetical Anna. But like a bird, she would dart in for a crumb of friendship before hopping out of reach again. Years later, I was astonished when Natasha told me she had been deliberately leaving her diary out on the table for me to read. I wish I had known. For she was still stonewalling me with her silences. What I write here about her came out only much later, when she started to relax.

  Anna grew up in a remote Volga village where cleverness was regarded with suspicion. An only child, her parents worked on a collective farm. It was her maternal grandmother who largely brought her up. The old woman was educated at a Leningrad school for blue-blooded girls, before war swept her out to the steppes. Anna’s childhood was marked by the tug-of-war between her grandmother’s middle-class expectations and those of her rural father. But Anna remained obdurately herself.

  She always hated being cuddled and never joined the village girls who flocked together, giggling and sharing
secrets. I imagine her crouching awkwardly over a book or watching a trail of ants cross the porch of her family’s wooden house. In July, the month of the falling stars, I see her creeping out of the house in the evening to lie on the rough grass of the steppe, and breathe the smell of wormwood. When the night sky lit up with summer lightning, I picture her rushing outside to wait for the cloudbursts that followed.

  She came to trust animals more than people. Anna’s mother had a gift with animals, and the household was full of them. When someone ran over a dog, or found a bird with a broken wing, they left it with her mother. A man brought an owl which had been shot and wounded. The bird refused to leave when it was healed and lived with the hens. It never attacked the chicks, or took more than its fair share of food. There was a crow that could not fly, too. On summer evenings, it would sit by Anna’s mother in front of the house and defend her against anyone who came too close.

  Only rarely did the wider world intrude on village life, as it did on the day of the oranges. It was midwinter, and the snow was deep on the steppes when Anna’s grandmother sent her out to the shop. Usually, the same meager array of goods sat there year in year out. But that day the shop was glowing: there were oranges everywhere. Anna had never seen one before. A freight train from central Asia had overturned, carrying fruit for the Party elite. The villagers went home with bulging bags, then queued again. All winter, the snow remained littered with orange peel. Not until she went to university was Anna able to start exploring the mysteries suggested by the sudden appearance of those oranges.

  • • •

  Before the fall of Soviet power I used to argue about the past with a Moscow friend called Grisha. He insisted that in Russia you could not afford to look back, because you would not survive what you found. I argued that only by facing the past could you move forward. In Marx, Anna watched me struggling to get people to talk about the past. She even introduced me to people. But it was only later that she admitted how hard she had battled to do the same herself.

  Misfortune had rained down on this part of the Volga during the Soviet period. It was bitterly fought over in the Civil War, being a rich grain-producing region. When the Bolsheviks secured it, the Volga Germans’ reputation as farmers proved their downfall. Though mostly just thrifty peasants, to the Bolsheviks they were “kulaks,” class enemies. The grain quotas imposed were three times higher than elsewhere. Sometimes, they were higher than the harvests themselves. By 1920 the requisitioning parties were taking people’s last food, and next year’s seed corn as well. The poor killed their livestock. They ate grass and the thatch off their roofs.

  As famine loomed, the German peasants exploded in rage. They buried their grain and staged armed revolts. They were not alone: much of the Russian countryside was in rebellion, but on the Volga it was worse. It was a brave Bolshevik who ventured unarmed into the countryside from Marxstadt (as Marx was then called). They risked being ripped apart. In the town square farmers were selling mechanical reapers for a loaf of bread.

  By 1921 96.9 percent of the region’s population was starving. Hunger broke the peasants’ rebellion. In the early twenties, when other parts of the countryside were enjoying a respite, here on the Middle Volga a quarter of the population died in famines. Cannibalism was commonplace.

  Until glasnost, it was a punishable offense to talk about these matters, and people were still afraid. I became a connoisseur of silences. There was the habit of fear, and the hope that if they stayed silent, the horror would die with them. But the toxic past had a way of seeping through, burdening the children with a distress that, being ignorant of the past, they had no way of combating.

  Mostly, I retrieved clues and omissions, fragments of narrative. But there was too little matter, too much dammed-up feeling. The most devastating stories were the hardest to verify. For instance, I kept hearing how, after the Wehrmacht invaded in June 1941, the secret police tried to lure the Volga Germans into collaboration, in order to justify their impending deportation. Airplanes with fascist markings flew over the fields where the Volga Germans were harvesting. They dropped paratroopers, wearing fascist uniforms and armed with Valter pistols. The women, old men, and children rounded them up with their pitchforks and scythes and marched them into the nearest Party headquarters. They found that these “spies” did not even speak German. Some were Poles; others broke into fluent Russian when cornered. One pulled off his shirt to reveal his NKVD uniform underneath.

  • • •

  Saratov’s leading historian of the Volga Germans told me that this was a Volga German myth, born of a pathological need to prove their innocence. He had found no evidence of it in the archives. But the clues I picked up suggested it did happen. General Anders, some of whose Poles were involved, mentions it in his memoirs. Someone I knew had heard a retired Russian colonel from the Ministry of the Interior testify publicly that the “spies” were all shot, to destroy all evidence of this failed attempt to provoke the Volga Germans into betraying their country. In Siberia I met an old German who told me that a Soviet German Party apparatchik confessed on his deathbed that he was there when the harvesters brought in one such “spy”: the German Party workers were sworn to secrecy, and, terrible to record, they remained faithful to their promise, despite being deported for a crime they did not commit.

  All this reminded me of a Russian saying: the real fools are not those who think they can predict the future, but those who believe they can predict the past. In the end, maybe my Moscow friend Grisha was right when he said that in Russia you could not afford to look back. Here, the past was toxic. It could be taken only in small doses.

  • • •

  Glasnost was well under way before Anna learned that her village was German before the war. There was only one Russian family in the village then, and they still lived there. She got to know the grandfather. He never talked about what he had seen, but he confided it to paper. He wrote compulsively; when his eyesight failed, the family took his pen away. He went on writing in pencil. When the lead wore down, he kept writing. Anna strained to read the words from the indentations left on the paper: he recalled the summer day when armed men arrived and rounded up his neighbors. When they were gone, he described galloping for his life on horseback, pursued by a stampede of maddened cows: udders bursting, they were desperate to find someone to relieve them of their milk.

  Anna’s family was haunted by the past, too. One night when she was little and her parents were away she woke up to find her grandfather sitting with an axe in his hands, muttering about not being able to go into his room because “they” were waiting for him. After that, her parents hid all the axes and knives in the attic, leaving only one blunt knife in the kitchen. As he grew older, her grandfather’s “enemies” loomed larger. He would shout in his sleep, tormented by the fear that “they” were coming for him.

  Anna tried to find out what had traumatized her grandfather. Although he had escaped the famines, prison, and labor camp, he was a Pole during years when that was cause for deportation. He disguised his name, pretending to be Belorussian.

  When his family were evacuated from Leningrad, he volunteered to stay behind. He endured the Wehrmacht’s 872-day blockade; that winter of 1941 when, with the temperature at minus forty and rations down to two slices of bread a day, gangs were killing for ration cards, trading in rats and human flesh. He was one of the wraiths with lumpy green faces who came through, when some eight hundred thousand died of starvation.

  Anna concluded that his trauma went back further, to 1938, when one in ten of the adult population was behind wire, and the secret police had their monthly quotas of arrests to fulfill. One night, armed men took Anna’s grandfather away. The family thought they would never see him again. But next morning he walked through the door, a free man. That was unheard of. When a Jew who admired Anna’s grandmother was arrested she blamed her husband, and tried to turn Anna against him. But she loved her grandpa.

  “After his death I went into his room, a
nd I could feel his terror,” she told me. “The walls of his room were steeped in it.” So, perhaps, was the next generation. One of Anna’s cousins spent years in an asylum, while tension surrounded Anna like a highvoltage fence. At night she barely slept, as if afraid that if she relaxed she might lose control.

  Someone described Anna to me as a pravednik, or truth bearer. It was a phrase the writer Nikolai Leskov used to describe some of his heroes. He took the concept from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, where God is challenged to spare the cities for the sake of a handful of innocents. The pravedniki in Leskov’s stories were ordinary men and women distinguished by their readiness to sacrifice themselves for others. By this definition, Anna was indeed a pravednik. But with the collapse of the Russian German homeland, she had lost her cause.

  I had been looking for someone to blame for the failure of that plan to revive the homeland for Russia’s Germans on the Volga. But Anna’s conclusion was that there was no point in blame, that only the bone’s prayer and the wind over the steppe would heal what had been done.

  THE DEVIL’S TUNE

  When Natasha’s KGB cousin advised her not to move to Marx, because the German homeland was not going to happen, he knew what he was talking about. The KGB ran a brilliant campaign of destabilization against the reestablishment of that homeland, and it seems to have worked. What follows is an account of what I think happened, though thanks to the wall of silence, piecing together any coherent account was hard. If I am right, the story is revealing about the way Russia’s secret service goes about its work against its own people.

  The operation was probably hatched in 1989, when Gorbachev’s liberal policies were running into trouble. The problem was that the Russian Germans had been promised a homeland, and their cause was legitimate. But with violent ethnic clashes breaking out over the Soviet Union’s southern flank, the prospect of creating a new ethnic enclave in the middle of Russia, particularly one connected to a European power, was alarming.