My mother is relaxed, at her most charming. Among the guests is a Turkish ballet dancer, a tall, beautiful woman with a dancer’s rangy physicality. She and my mother are talking ballet with great passion. I am at the end of the table, talking to our host, when I hear the tone of my mother’s voice change; nothing dramatic, a modulation only. But the tiny shift cuts across the various conversations at the table and we turn to listen.
She is telling a story about Solikamsk, a wartime town of lost children to which she was evacuated in 1943. The teacher at the overcrowded school she attended would bring a tray of plain black bread at lunchtime with which to feed her class. She would tell the local children to leave their pieces for the orphans, though they were all close to starving.
My mother tells the story simply, with no great pathos. She looks at no one. On her face is what I can only describe as a smile of pain. With a small gesture of her two index fingers she shows us the size of the pieces of bread on the tray. Her eyes stream with tears. The dancer begins to cry too, and hugs my mother. I, though I have heard the story before, am struck by the ordinary miracle of human life and fate – that the hungry child in that wartime winter schoolroom is the very same person sitting among us on that hot afternoon, as though she has joined our carefree modern lives from another, distant world of war and hunger.
My aunt Lenina’s kitchen on Frunzenskaya Embankment, on a luminous Moscow summer evening in the late 1990s. I am sitting on my aunt’s wide window sill, smoking a cigarette after a gargantuan, greasy dinner which I have been forced to praise at least five times before she is satisfied that I am content. Lenina is boiling water in her old enamel kettle, disdaining the German electric kettle her daughters have given her.
Lenina, my mother’s sister, is as heavy-set as their mother Martha was, wide-hipped and large-breasted, her back bowed with the weight of the world’s troubles. She has Martha’s piercing blue eyes. So does my mother, so do I, so does my son Nikita. But in temperament Lenina seems to be more like her gregarious father, Boris Bibikov. She loves gathering friends around the kitchen table, chatting, gossiping, intriguing. She likes to pull strings and to organize other people’s lives by means of epic telephone conversations. She is highly skilled at terrorizing television presenters during phone-ins and shop managers in person. She is a big woman with a powerful voice, and suffers from many, many near-fatal illnesses which she loves to talk about.
As she pours the tea, Lenina launches into her favourite subject, her nephew’s variegated love life. Her eye gleams with a girlish prurience. I have seen through Lenina’s stern old lady act long before. That is just one weapon in the formidable arsenal she deploys in the daily drama of struggle, conflict and scandal with the outside world. What she really wants to do is sit forward on her stool at the corner of the table, put an elbow on the table, fix her nephew with a beady eye and hear the latest details. At the naughty bits she cackles like a fishwife.
‘You’re lucky I don’t tell your mother any of this,’ she chortles. Strangely, though she never tires of scolding her own daughters, she seldom criticizes me during our weekly gossip sessions. Instead, she chips in with worldly-wise and often rather cynical advice. My aunt Lenina is, despite the halfcentury’s difference in our ages, a true friend and confidante.
Lenina has a phenomenal memory for detail. Our conversations always start in the present, but that is transient and quickly dealt with, insufficiently colourful and dramatic to hold her attention for long. She drifts back into the past, quite seamlessly, from one sentence to the next, setting off on a nightly ramble through the paths of her memory, her attention pulled this way and that, like a glass on a Ouija board, by different stories and voices.
As she gets older, less mobile and blinder, her imagination seems to become clearer and clearer. The past is becoming more immediate to her than the present. At night the dead visit her, she complains. They won’t leave her alone – her husband, her parents, her friends, her granddaughter Masha, dead of cancer at twenty-six, all arguing, cajoling, laughing, nagging, getting on with the business of life as though they don’t realize that they’re dead. She sees the past in her dreams, incessantly. ‘It’s like a cinema,’ she says. As she approaches the end of her life, its beginning seems to her ever more vivid. Details float up, conversations, incidents, stories, snippets of life seen as tiny film clips, which she notes down in order to tell me the next time I come over. She knows I know the dramatis personae so well by now that they need no introduction.
‘Did I tell you what I remembered about Uncle Yasha and the girls he picked up in his Mercedes? What Varya said?’ she asks over the phone, and I know immediately that she’s talking about a famously immoral automobile my great-uncle Yakov shipped back from Berlin in 1946, and the fury that this invoked in my great-aunt. ‘She was so furious that she threw all the flowerpots in the house at him, and the crockery from the kitchen. Yasha couldn’t stop laughing, even as the plates smashed around him. That’s what made her most angry!’
Lenina sees the world in terms of conversations, tones of voice, people. She doesn’t read much, unlike her sister, my bookish mother. She’s a performer, with the kitchen table as her auditorium and an ever-changing set of friends, supplicants, former students, neighbours and relatives as the audience.
Lyudmila and Lenina’s story begins in another kitchen in a handsome, high-ceilinged apartment in the centre of Chernigov in midsummer 1937. The tall windows stood wide open to catch the breeze off the River Desna. In a corner, my three-year-old mother was playing with a rag doll. My aunt Lenina leaned on the wide window sill, watching the street for the sleek silhouette of her father’s big black official Packard. She was twelve years old, round-faced with large, intelligent eyes. She was fashionably dressed in her favourite white cotton tennis skirt, copied from a Moscow magazine. Outside, across the tops of the plane trees of Lermontov Street, she could see the golden domes of the cathedral of Chernigov’s medieval Kremlin.
At the kitchen table her mother Martha fussed over a packed lunch for her husband Boris: roast chicken, boiled eggs and cucumber, some biscuits, a pinch of salt wrapped in newspaper, all packed in greaseproof paper. Boris was due to stop by on his way to the station to pick up his luggage before setting off to go on holiday at a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Black Sea coast. It was to be his first holiday in three years.
Martha was complaining to no one in particular that her husband was late again, which was typical, just typical. Boris was so obsessed with work that he couldn’t even take the morning off on the day his holiday was due to begin. He always seemed to have more time for his Party committees than for his family.
Martha was a tall, sturdy woman, already running to the plumpness Russian peasant women often acquire along with motherhood. She was wearing a dress of imported cotton and carefully applied make-up. Her voice seemed always to be nagging, or so it seemed to Lenina, who was dreading the idea of a week alone with her mother without her father to intercede. At the sink stood Varya, the family’s long-suffering housemaid, a sturdy country girl who wore a wide sarafan, the Russian peasant woman’s traditional dress, with a starched apron pinned to the front. Varya slept in a kind of cupboard at the end of the hall, but she earned money and was fed, so she put up with Martha, and worse. She winked at Lenina when they caught each other’s eye as Martha rushed out of the kitchen, grumbling, to check Boris’s luggage, which was standing in the wide hallway.
Lyudmila – or Mila for short – was as devoted to her elder sister Lenina as a little dog, and preferred not to let her sibling out of her sight. The girls had a complicity with their father, a mutual defence pact which Martha disliked and didn’t understand.
Lenina, at the window, saw her father’s big black car round the corner and roll to a halt in front of the apartment block. There was a clatter on the stairs and Boris bounded in to the apartment. He was a powerfully built man, running to fat, prematurely bald with a shaved head. He wore self-consciously proletarian
clothes, plain linen shirts in summer and sailor’s striped vests in winter. He looked much older than his thirty-four years. He was already the second most powerful man in the city, Secretary for Propaganda and Agitation of the Communist Party’s Regional Committee. A noted political agitator, rising star within the Party, a holder of the Order of Lenin, Boris was serving his apprenticeship in a provincial administration as a prelude to a powerful post in Kiev or even Moscow. He was a man going places. Ignoring his wife’s tirade of scolding and advice, he quickly kissed his two daughters goodbye.
‘Be good, look after your mother and sister,’ he whispered to Lenina.
He silenced his wife with a quick embrace, exchanged a few parting words with her, grabbed his packed case and lunch and ran downstairs. Lenina rushed to the window and saw her father’s driver standing by the car, smoking a cigarette, which he tossed away as he heard his boss coming down the stone staircase. Lenina waved frantically as her beloved Papa climbed into his car, and he waved back, quickly, a sweeping gesture more like a salute. It was the last time she ever saw him.
After she had seen her husband off, Martha went across the landing to see if anything was wrong with the neighbours. She hadn’t heard the usual thud of their door closing as the family went to work in the morning, and nobody had come home for lunch. When Martha returned Lenina noticed she was pale and nervous. There had been no response when she rang their doorbell. Then she’d seen a stamped paper pasted on to the door bearing the seal of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD. She knew immediately what it meant. The Bibikovs’ neighbours, the family of a colleague of her husband’s, had been arrested in the night.
The next morning there was a tiredness in Martha’s eyes as she dressed little Lyudmila, a peremptoriness in her tone as she dragooned the children for a shopping expedition, squashing cotton summer cloche hats on to their heads.
On the way to the market, Martha stopped to tie little Lyudmila’s shoelace. As she crouched, a young girl about Lenina’s age walked silently up to them. She leaned over to Martha’s ear and whispered something, then walked hurriedly away. Instead of standing up, Martha sank down on to her knees on the pavement like a shot animal. Her children tried to help her up, alarmed. In a few moments she recovered, stood, and turned back home, dragging Lyudmila as she stumbled to keep pace. Years later, Martha told Lenina what the girl had said: ‘Tonight they will come with a search warrant.’ Nobody knew who the girl was, or who had sent her.
Back in the apartment, Martha began to cry. She had been parted from her husband only once in their twelve years of marriage, when he went away to serve in the Red Army soon after they had met. And now he was gone, and the world they had made was about to fly apart.
That night the children went to bed hungry after a supper of kitchen scraps their mother had hurriedly thrown together. Martha couldn’t sleep, she told Lenina later, and spent half the night doing laundry. Then she sat by the open window listening for the sound of a car. She fell asleep just before dawn, and never heard it.
Martha was woken by a sharp knocking on the door. She looked at her watch; it was just after four in the morning. Martha pulled on a dressing gown and opened the door. Four men stood outside, all wearing black leather jackets with pistol belts, and leather boots. Their officer showed her a search warrant and an arrest warrant for her husband. He asked if Bibikov was at home. Martha said no, he was away, and began pleading for an explanation. The men pushed past her and started to search the apartment. The children were woken by the sound of voices. Lyudmila began crying. A man opened the door of their room, switched on the light briefly, looked around and told the children to be quiet. Lyudmila got into bed with Lenina and cried herself back to sleep. Their mother distractedly came in to comfort them to the sounds of drawers being rifled through and cupboards emptied in the next room.
The men stayed for twelve hours, systematically searching every book, every file in Boris’s study. The men did not allow Martha to go to the kitchen to feed the children. Lenina remembers their faces, ‘hard as their leather coats’. When they had finished the search, confiscating a boxful of documents they made Martha sign for, the NKVD officers sealed the apartment’s four rooms and left Martha and her children in the kitchen, still in their nightdresses. As the door slammed shut, Martha collapsed on the floor in tears. Lyudmila and Lenina also began bawling, hugging their mother.
When Martha managed to pull herself together, she went into the bathroom and wrung out a wet dress. Wiping her face in the bathroom mirror, she told Lenina to look after her sister, and left the house. She ran to the local NKVD headquarters, sure that their family had been the victim of some terrible mistake. She came back to the children late that night, empty-handed and desperate. She had found out almost nothing, except that she was just one of dozens of panicking wives who had besieged the stony-faced receptionist with questions about their missing husbands, only to be told that the men were ‘under investigation’ and that the women would be kept informed.
Though Martha didn’t know it at the time, her husband was still a free man, relaxing in a first-class sleeper coach heading south and innocently looking forward to his well-earned days of rest at the Party sanatorium.
2. ‘Not Men but Giants!’
Lads, let’s fulfil the Plan!
Slogan chalked on the factory toilet wall by Boris Bibikov
There are only two surviving photographs of Boris Bibikov.
One is an informal group shot taken at the Kharkov Tractor Factory around 1932. He is sitting on the ground in front of two dozen fresh-faced, beaming young workers, his arm around the shoulder of a crew-cut young man. Bibikov is wearing a rumpled, open-necked shirt and his head is shaven, in the proletarian style affected by many of his generation of Party cadres. Unlike everyone else in the photo, there is no smile on his face, only a severe glare.
The other photo, from his Party card, was taken early in 1936. Bibikov is wearing a Party cadre’s tunic, buttoned to the neck, and he once again stares purposefully from the frame. There is more than a hint of cruelty in his down-turned mouth. He is every inch the ruthless Party man. The formality of the pose and the fact that Bibikov was born in an age before one felt entirely unselfconscious in front of a camera mean that the mask is near perfect. There is no hint of the man in either picture, only of the man he wanted to be.
He died a man without a past. Like many of his age and class, Bibikov shed his former self like a shameful skin, to be reborn as a Homo Sovieticus, a new Soviet man. He reinvented himself so effectively that even the NKVD investigators who painstakingly chronicled his passage through the NKVD’s ‘meat grinder’ in the summer and autumn of 1937 were able to unearth only the merest trace of his former existence. There were no photos, no papers, no records of his life before the Party.
His family were descended from one of Catherine the Great’s generals, Alexander Bibikov, who earned the Empress’s favour and a noble title by putting down a peasant uprising led by Emeliyan Pugachev in 1773. The revolt was crushed with great brutality, just as the Empress ordered; summary hangings and beatings were meted out to thousands of rebels who had dared to defy the state.
Boris Bibikov was born in the Crimea in 1903 or 1904 – his NKVD file says the former, his mother writes the latter. His father Lev, a small landowner, died when Boris and his two brothers, Yakov and Isaac, were very young. Bibikov never talked about him. Their mother, Sofia, was a Jewess from a well-to-do Crimean merchant family whose father Naum owned a flour mill and a grain elevator, which could account for the odd ‘profession’ Bibikov listed on his arrest form, ‘mill worker’. Boris knew English, he did not fight in the Civil War. That is just about all we know of his early life. Yakov, the only one of the Bibikov brothers to survive past the Second World War, who lived until 1979, was similarly obsessive – he never mentioned his background, or his executed brother. For the Bibikov brothers there was only the future, no looking back.
I don’t believ
e that my grandfather was a hero, but he lived in heroic times, and such times brought out an impulse to greatness in people large and small. The slogans of the Bolshevik Revolution were Peace, Land and Bread; and at the time this message must, to ambitious and idealistic men, have seemed fresh, vibrant and couched in the language of prophesy. The Party’s cadres were to be nothing less than the avant-garde of world history. At some point soon after the October Revolution swept away the old Russia Bibikov seems, like many members of the ‘former classes’, to have had some sort of romantic epiphany. Or perhaps – who now knows – it was an impulse of ambition, vanity or greed. His inheritance, his maternal grandfather’s minor Crimean flour-milling empire, was nationalized in 1918. Many of his grander relatives in Moscow and Petrograd had fled into exile or been arrested as class enemies. The Bolsheviks were Russia’s new masters, and the route to advancement for an energetic and intelligent young man was to join the winning side, as quickly as possible.
But the only witness we have left is Lenina, and her testimony is that her father was a high-minded and selfless man. And even if that wasn’t the case, Lenina’s word has a kind of emotional truth of its own. So let us say that a new world was being built, and Boris’s imagination was caught by the grandeur of the vision, fresh, new and beautiful, and so he and his two younger brothers, Yakov and Isaac, threw themselves wholeheartedly into it.
During the last year of the Civil War Boris enrolled in the newly opened Higher Party School in the Crimean port of Simferopol. The school was designed to train a new generation of commissars to rule the great empire which the Bolsheviks had recently won, much to their own surprise. After a year’s training in theoretical Marxist-Leninism and the rudiments of agitation and propaganda, my grandfather was inducted into the Party in May 1924, a young firebrand of twenty-one, ready to serve the Revolution wherever it needed him.
Stalin's Children Page 2
