I know that these conditions were familiar to you and that to some extent they were experienced by you as well. But they were of course applied to us men more forcefully and severely than to women. Before our meeting at that time, I had repudiated two documents, even though I had signed up to them. But how many people are able to go boldly, and uprightly, to the scaffold. Unfortunately, I do not belong to their number, because I am not alone. I had to think of my wife and shield her.
To put it more clearly, the times were then such that by virtue of the situation, as it were, one person dragged another after him into the same abyss. In repudiating and disowning the two documents signed by me, I did so in the firm knowledge that they were false and had not been drafted by me. But as I have said, I was compelled, if only for a time, to save myself from the scaffold with which I was threatened.
Touched by Nikiforov’s honesty and his confession, Olga recalled: ‘When I think of my terror in the morgue, I understand very well indeed that a prisoner is only to be condemned if he bears false witness simply to please his jailers, or to save his own skin. But he cannot really be blamed for losing his head or giving way to terror. Nikiforov was not the only one. All too many others, during the first few days of their imprisonment, were turned into informers, witnesses for the prosecution and, in general, servants of the inquisition.’
That so many prisoners weakened under terrible pressures makes Olga’s bravery in the face of persistent interrogation, and while pregnant with her lover’s child, even more impressive. She did not use anyone else to save her, least of all Pasternak, the man she was protecting. Irina proudly agreed: ‘It is clear that my mother came out of her questioning victorious. If their aim was to build a case against Pasternak, none of her statements could be used against him.’
Hours after being returned to her ‘home cell’ in the Lubyanka, Olga felt searing pains in her abdomen. She was taken to the prison hospital. A doctor’s note in an official document stated that Olga was in the clinic ‘due to bleeding from the womb’ and that ‘the arrested person said that she was pregnant’. She had lost the baby. ‘Here Boria’s and my child perished before it was even born,’ Olga later pitifully recalled.
‘I am not convinced it was a natural miscarriage,’ said Irina, looking back. ‘My mother was six months pregnant. I think that she was deliberately sent to the morgue and left in the freezing cold to induce a miscarriage … Boris Pasternak was known all over the world. They did not want the circumstances of a baby’s birth or death to be known … This was the authorities’ way of closing the whole story down. If news of the baby had got out, people would begin to talk about Pasternak again. This was their way of silencing talk on Pasternak and getting rid of potential embarrassment. It was a truly horrible, sickening regime.’
Olga’s case – No 3038 – which had been opened on 12 October 1949, was closed on 5 July 1950. A troika – a three-man tribunal – issued a ‘mild’ sentence. Under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which dealt with political crimes, Olga was to spend five years in a re-education labour camp ‘for close contact with persons suspected of espionage’. The Accusation Act for her case read: ‘The witnesses’ statements have enabled us to uncover your actions: you have continued to denigrate our regime and the Soviet Union. You have listened to the “voice of America”. You have slandered Soviet writers who had patriotic views and you have praised to the skies Pasternak’s work, a writer with anti-establishment opinions.’
It marked the beginning of a new and terrible ordeal for Olga, who was destined for the labour camps of Potma, over 450 kilometres away from Moscow, in the ‘Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Mordovia’. If they couldn’t touch Boris, Olga would serve in his place.
6
Cranes Over Potma
Whilst Olga was still in the Lubyanka, word reached Boris, via Maria, that his lover was pregnant. Boris proceeded to rush around Moscow, telling friends and even the slightest acquaintances that Olga would soon be having their baby in prison, enlisting their sympathy, and fixating on the idea of being a father again. He had no way of knowing of the unborn child’s death.
When an official summoned him to go to the Lubyanka prison it confirmed to him that he was to be handed the baby in person. He was going to a ‘terrible place’ he told Liusia Popova, where he had been instructed that ‘they want to hand something over to me’. He broke the news of Olga’s pregnancy to Zinaida, who ‘made a terrible scene’. However, for once he stood his ground, announcing to his furious wife that they must take the child in and care for it until Olga was released. When Liusia asked how Zinaida had taken the news of Olga’s pregnancy, his response was resigned: ‘I just had to put up with it; it’s only right that I should suffer too in some way … what kind of life can the child have in there? Of course, they want me to go and pick it up. But in case I don’t come back, I just wanted you to know where I am going.’
At the Lubyanka, Boris was met by Semionov, Olga’s interrogator. Semionov took him to a side room and instead of handing him a baby, gave him a large bundle of letters and books: the love letters that he had written to Olga and the books with their precious inscriptions.
Utterly confused and bewildered, Boris became agitated. He argued with Semionov, repeatedly demanding to know what was going on. During the meeting, the door kept opening and shutting as a number of officials peeked in; they had heard that the famous poet was in the building and wanted to see Pasternak with their own eyes. When Boris was not given the answers he sought, he asked for a pencil and paper so he could write a letter to the Minister of State Security, Abakumov.
Later Semionov used the letter in his interrogations of Olga. Covering most of the page with his hand, he said to her: ‘You see, even Pasternak himself admits you could have done something wrong from the point of view of the State.’ When Olga saw the ‘soaring cranes’ of Boris’s handwriting, she felt elated: it was proof that he had not been killed. It was the first concrete evidence she had had of his existence for over ten agonising months.
In his letter to Abakumov, Pasternak had written that if the authorities believed that Olga had done something wrong, then he was willing to accept this. But if that was the case, then he too was guilty of the same crimes. And if his standing as a writer counted for anything, they should take him at his word and put him in prison instead of Olga. ‘In this totally sincere letter to the Minister,’ Olga reflected later, ‘there was of course also a certain characteristic element of playing the innocent, but whatever he did was dear to my heart and came only as further proof of his love.’
Boris left the Lubyanka wholly dejected. ‘They didn’t give me the child but asked me to take away some of my letters,’ he told Liusia Popova. ‘I said they were addressed to her [Olga] and should be given back to her. But in the end I had to take a whole bundle of them, and some books with dedications as well.’ ‘So instead of the child, you’ll take home some love letters and other such things – which will be just as bad,’ came Liusia’s pragmatic response. She advised him not to take the whole bundle back with him to Peredelkino and risk Zinaida’s wrath but to read them through and sort them out beforehand.
Boris took her advice: he went to see Olga’s family. According to Irina: ‘The minute he came back to us, he tore every single page out of the books he had written on. Books he had given her during their love affair all signed with dedications full of love and affection. Was that because he thought they had been read at the Lubyanka?’ she wondered. Or maybe out of guilt?
Pasternak was acutely aware that Olga’s continued incarceration was a blow levelled at him. Due to Stalin’s instructions and because of a mounting awareness that the arrest of a writer of his stature – he was an international celebrity and Nobel Prize candidate – would have unfavourable repercussions abroad, he remained untouched. Pasternak also worried for other friends who benefitted from no protection. He was still waiting to hear news of Titsian Tabidze, while the brother of another good friend, Alexan
der Gladkov, was in a camp in Kolyma. Alexander sent his brother the ‘precious gift’ of a volume of Boris’s poetry. When he eventually returned from his years in the gulag, his brother told Boris that he used to wake early every day in the barracks, to read his verses. ‘If ever something prevented me from doing so, I always felt as if I had not washed.’ Boris replied: ‘Oh if only I had known this then, in those black years, life would have been so much more bearable to think that I was out there too.’
That month Olga was taken to the transit camp of Butyrki, which she described as ‘a veritable paradise compared with the Lubyanka’. She, too, knew that the past months of interrogation had been aimed at only one person – Boris. ‘Just as a dossier was kept on Pushkin in the Third Section in the days of Nicholas I,’ Olga later observed,
so during the whole of his active life there was a file at the Lubyanka on Pasternak in which not only everything he wrote was entered, but also every word ever uttered by him in the presence of innumerable informers. Now we had ‘progress’ of a kind: Pasternak was not merely a subversive poet, but a British spy, no less. There was a kind of logic here: his father had lived and died in England, and his two sisters were still there. In other words: a British spy. From this it followed that if not Pasternak himself, then at least I must be packed off to a camp.
Many years later, Boris wrote to the German poet Renate Schweitzer: ‘[Olga] was put in jail on my account, as the person considered by the secret police to be closest to me, and they hoped that by means of a gruelling interrogation and threats they could extract enough evidence from her to put me on trial. I owe my life and the fact that they did not touch me in those years to her heroism and endurance.’
Olga’s family soon learned the devastating news that she had been transferred out of the Lubyanka en route for the gulag. Of these uncertain, distressing times Irina said: ‘1949, 1950, 1951 … those terrible years went by like hearses, and each one of them was worse than the previous one.’ Irina was thirteen years old when she ‘lost’ her mother to the camps. Fortunately, much of her emotional stability and sense of security came from her grandparents. ‘But it was a difficult age not to have my mother.’ However, their ‘true guardian was Pasternak.’ After Olga was arrested, Maria decided to give their ‘unrealistic love affair’ her blessing, and from that point on she fully welcomed Pasternak into her home. Boris already helped with the children’s school fees, but when Maria’s husband died in 1950, he took complete financial responsibility for the family. ‘It is thanks to him that we were able to ignore the misery and difficulties that were surrounding us, enabling us to enjoy a reasonably normal childhood like anybody else,’ said Irina. ‘My memories are not just about dresses mended a thousand times, nor about split pea soup either. I can also remember Christmas trees, presents, books and trips to the theatre. Thanks to Pasternak, we were able to live.’
Boris regularly visited Olga’s family, bringing them money as often as he could. ‘He was always in a rush as he had a lot to do,’ Irina remembered, ‘but most likely he wanted to run away from the pity we made him feel. He felt responsible for our tragic fate, for our orphan status, for my mother’s arrest and therefore for our adored grandfather dying of a broken heart. He was devastated by my mother’s sentence. It killed him.’ ‘Irochka, I know you don’t want me to go but I need to,’ Boris would say. ‘He would always kiss me goodbye really loudly, slam the door and run down the stairs … My grandmother put the money in her bag. She would pay the rent and would then buy us all kinds of nice things with whatever was left over.’
During this time, the family had no concrete information about Olga’s fate. It was only later that they discovered that after the short ‘vacation’ in the less harrowing transit prison, she had been sent with other ‘harmful elements’ to the Potma rehabilitation camp.
From Butyrki, Olga and the other prisoners were crammed into a passenger coach. The stench was suffocating. Olga was fortunate enough to get a ‘berth’ on the luggage rack at the top of the compartment, from where she could see the sky. ‘Sick at heart, as I gazed out at the moon, I mentally composed a poem about separation.’ The last part of their journey was a forced march across open country. Olga walked next to a kind old army general, who tried to comfort her by saying, reassuringly: ‘Everything will soon be over.’
Olga was completely unprepared for how gruelling life at Potma would be. The blazing summers proved worse than the arctic winters. For thirteen hours a day she had to work in the parched Mordovian fields, turning over the bone-dry, unyielding earth. Her nemesis and main tormentor was a sadistic female brigade leader called Buinaya. An agricultural expert and prisoner, she was a ‘small, scrawny woman with a sharp nose, and looked just like a bird of prey’. Buinaya was serving a ten-year sentence for getting into trouble on a collective farm. Her two sons were in camps for criminals in the north. She enjoyed the confidence of the prison authorities, maintaining her privileged status by showing the escort guards how to bully and intimidate women like Olga.
Olga’s five-year sentence was considered short; most were decades longer. The lighter sentences were a cause of resentment amongst the prisoners. One of Olga’s fellow inmates, an old peasant woman from Western Ukraine, had received a twenty-five-year sentence just for giving milk to a stranger. Buinaya reserved her most intense hatred for privileged Moscow women, whom she saw as pampered and ineffectual at hard labour. She preferred the hefty Ukrainian peasant women who had worked in the fields all their lives, and who displayed considerably more stamina. Equally, the peasants resented the Muscovites with their ‘ridiculously short prison sentences’, considering them barely any better than their jailers as they enjoyed, in their eyes, relative leniency.
The only emotional sustenance for the homesick and lonely prisoners, who never knew their exact fate, was a letter from home. A home they were all too painfully aware that they might never see again. The Muscovite women would do anything for the chance of a letter – being prepared to work on Sundays for the chance of earning even the slightest privilege – which made the peasant women hate them all the more.
But it was a group of nuns who were singled out for the most appalling cruelties. They refused to report for work in the fields, preferring to go to the punishment block with its stifling cells, crawling with bugs. And so they were dragged out like sacks and flung in the dust next to the guard house, where they lay under the broiling sun exactly as they had fallen. Impassively, the soldiers then kicked and tossed them over towards the guard-house walls; pretty young women, older, weaker nuns – all were treated with the same rough contempt. The nuns in turn ‘openly scorned their tormentors and just went on chanting their prayers, whether in the barracks or in the fields, on the occasions when they were dragged out there by force.’ Unlike the rest of the prisoners, they could do without letters, which made them more resilient. ‘The camp authorities hated them and were quite baffled by the firmness of their spirit shown by these women they were so mistreating.’ They ‘even refused to take the meagre sugar ration we were given, and the camp officials simply couldn’t understand what kept them alive. In fact, they were kept alive by their faith’, wrote Olga.
Olga remembered the summer of 1952 as being the worst. ‘This was hell on earth. This was surely what it must be like to live in hell?’ The day started at seven in the morning, when Olga had to work a few cubic metres of hard-baked soil. To earn her food rations she had to turn it over, hoeing with unpractised hands, finding it difficult to even lift up the achingly heavy pick. Buinaya would shriek at the women all day. She regularly grabbed Olga violently by the arm, thrusting the pick back into her hands when she dropped it. ‘The only thing was to sweat it out to the end of the day, cursing the sun, which was now flaming white-hot in the June sky and took such a very long time to go down. Oh for a breath of wind! But even the wind, when it blew, was hot and brought no relief.’ Even though there was no question of the workers making their impossible quota, or even half of it, they w
ere frequently punished by having their mail – letters and parcels – stopped.
The Mordovian summer seemed never-ending and without mercy. Olga felt utter despair: ‘Oh for the slush of autumn – how much better to wade through the mud of these Mordovian roads. Let me soak in a rain-sodden quilted jacket, anything rather than swelter in a smock of “Devil’s skin”.’ The prisoners’ grey smocks, with numbers marked on the back and the hems weighted with chloride of lime, were made of a cheap shiny material known as ‘Devil’s skin’, which did not let the air through. Sweat poured off the prisoners, flies crawled all over them. There was no shade. Not a moment’s respite. Added to this, Olga’s shoes of imitation leather were ten sizes too big for her petite size thirty-four feet. She had to tie them onto her feet with tape. They seemed to get glued into the ground and often she literally couldn’t move.
Some of the women, including Olga, wore strange-looking hats made of gauze stretched over pieces of wire, to prevent them from passing out in the heat or their skin from blistering. Buinaya ‘despised’ them for this attempt to save their complexion, ridiculing them as precious. She had never shaded her face from the sun, so her skin was leathery, wrinkled and aged, even though she was only forty.
As she worked, Olga’s head was alive with Boris. For over two years she had received no word of him, so had no idea if he was alive or dead. He was injected ‘like dye’ into her nervous system; so consumed was she with thoughts of him. To keep her mind agile – and to ward off insanity, or a complete mental breakdown – she memorised his poems, along with poems that she composed all day in her mind. There was no point in trying to write the verses down, as the prisoners were searched every evening. Even innocent scraps of paper were taken away and destroyed.
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