The transcript was typed, and Bibikov signed at the bottom. The writing holds no clue as to what was going through his mind as he scribbled his signature.
But one simple confession was not enough. The bureaucracy demanded more detail, more names to fulfil the quota of enemies of the people to be found in every district and region in the country. Like scriptwriters concocting a soap opera of grotesque complexity, the investigators required their vast cast to corroborate each others’ stories, to add new layers to the plot. Bibikov’s first confession brought no respite. The interrogations continued. But at some point something within him must have rebelled at the perversity and the horror, and he tried to claw his way back into the world of the sane. Those moments of defiance ring through the thin, laconic pages of the file like a silent shout.
‘Question to Fedayev,’ reads the stark text of the transcript of his first ‘confrontation’ with a fellow ‘conspirator’, the former head of the Kharkov Regional Committee. ‘Tell us what you know about Bibikov.’
‘Fedayev’s reply: “…In the course of two conversations with Bibikov I confirmed that he was ready to take part in the organization of Trotskyite work. In our last conversation we agreed to set up a Trotskyite group at the KhTZ… “
‘Question to Bibikov: “Do you confirm the suspect Fedayev’s statement?”
‘Bibikov’s reply: “No. That is a lie. We never had such a conversation.’
‘This statement has been read to us and is accurate. (Signed) Fedayev. The accused Bibikov refused to sign.’
But in the end his defiance was useless, witnessed only by NKVD Lieutenants Slavin and Chalkov, who conducted the confrontation, and Fedayev himself, who was probably too terrified to think Bibikov’s stand was anything other than masochistic stupidity. Bibikov eventually broke completely.
‘At the Kharkov Tractor Factory we decided to sabotage an expensive, complicated machine which was crucial to the production of wheeled tractors…’ he wrote in blotted, tiny writing in his third and last detailed confession. ‘We persuaded engineer KOZLOV to leave a tool in the machine so that it would be broken for a long period. The machine alone cost 40,000 in gold and is one of only two in the whole country… At the KhTZ we plotted to throw an artillery round from the war into a blast furnace to put it out of action for two or three months… I also recruited my own deputy, Ivan KAVITSKY, into our organization… We attempted to undermine the work of the KhTZ by delaying the fulfilment of orders for the Hammer and Sickle Tractor station, and delayed the payment of wages to the workers.’
In the margin are inexplicable notes in his own writing, apparently written under dictation, saying, ‘Who, What, When?’, ‘More precise’, ‘Which organization?’
‘Our evil counter-revolutionary act was averted only by the vigilance of senior engineer GINZBURG,’ the last confession concludes. ‘This is how I betrayed my Party. Bibikov.’
The manuscript had been carefully torn across halfway down the page. Above the tear are signs of some kind of scribble, as though the writer had tried, in despair, to erase the death sentence he had just written for himself.
Then his voice disappears. There are excerpts from the transcripts of other accused in which Bibikov’s name is mentioned – sixteen interlinking confessions, all meticulously typed with angry, almost punched-through commas between the capitalized names, ‘ZELENSKY, BUTSENKO, SAPOV, BRANDT, GENKIN, BIBIKOV…’
He was brought to trial before a closed session of the Military Collegium in Kiev on 13 October 1937, the so-called troika courts of three judges who heard in camera the cases of those accused under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which covered ‘any act designed to overthrow, undermine or weaken the authority of the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets’. The court’s conclusion is long and detailed, mostly repeating word for word the accounts of acts of sabotage included in the confessions. But for good measure, the final draft upped the charges and concluded that ‘Bibikov was a member of the k.r. [the term kontrarevolustionnaya is used so often that the typist begins to abbreviate it] Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist organization which carried out the wicked assassination of Comrade Kirov on 1 December 1934 and in following years planned and carried out terrorist acts against other Party and government leaders… We sentence the accused to the highest form of criminal punishment: to be shot and his property confiscated. Signed, A.M. ORLOV, S.N. ZHDANA, F.A. BATNER.’
Bibikov signed a form confirming that he had read the court’s ruling and sentence. They were the last recorded words he wrote. Signing off, with bureaucratic neatness, on the file which contained the state’s version of his life’s story. It was the final act of a life devoted to serving the Party.
The last form of the seventy-nine pages in the so-called ‘living’ file, the flimsiest of all, was a mimeographed quartersheet strip of paper roughly cut off at the bottom with scissors, which confirms that the sentence of the court has been carried out. There is no hint of where or how, though the usual method was ‘nine grams’, the weight of a pistol round, to the back of the head. The signature of the commanding officer is illegible; the date is 14 October 1937.
For the two days that I sat in Kiev exarrurung the file, Alexander Panamaryev, a young officer of the Ukrainian Security Service, sat with me, reading out passages of barely legible cursive script and explaining legal terms. He was pale and intelligent, about my age, the kind of quiet young man who looked as though he lived with his mother. He seemed, underneath an affected professional brusqueness, almost as moved as I was by what we read.
‘Those were terrible times,’ he said quietly as we took a cigarette break in the gathering dusk of Volodimirskaya Street, the granite bulk of the old NKVD building looming above us. ‘Your grandfather believed, but do you not think that his accusers believed also? Or the men who shot him? He knew that people had been shot before he was arrested, but did he speak out? How do we know what we would have done in that situation? May God forbid that we ever face the same test.’
Solzhenitsyn once posed the same, terrible question. ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? If only it was so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?’
Bibikov himself would have perfectly understood, with his rational mind, as he stood in a cellar or faced a prison wall in his last moments, the logic of his executioners. And perhaps – why not? – he might, if he had met different people in his early days in the Party, found different patrons, have become an executioner himself. Did he not explain away the famine which his Party had brought to the Ukraine as a necessary purging of enemy elements? Did he not consider himself one of the Revolution’s chosen, ruled by a higher morality? Bibikov was no innocent, caught by an evil and alien force beyond his comprehension. On the contrary, he was a propagandist, a fanatic of the new morality – the morality which now demanded his life, however pointlessly, for the greater good.
‘No, it was not for show nor out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defence of all the government’s actions,’ writes Solzhenitsyn. ‘They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness – otherwise insanity was not far off.’
When people become the building blocks of history, intelligent men can abdicate moral responsibility. Indeed the Purge – in Russian chistka, or ‘cleaning’ – was to those who made it something heroic, just as the building of the great factory was heroic to Bibikov. The difference was that Bibikov made his personal revolution in physical bricks and concrete, whereas the NKVD’s bricks were class enemies, every one sent to the execution chamber another piece of the great edifice of Socialism. When one condones a death for the sake of a cause, one condones them all.
In some ways, perhaps, Bibi
kov was more guilty than most. He was a senior Party member. Men like him gave the orders and compiled the lists. The rank-and-file investigators followed them. Were these men evil, then, given that they had no choice but to do what they were told? Was Lieutenant Chavin, a man who tortured confessions from Party men like Bibikov, not less guilty than the Party men themselves, who taught their juniors that ends justify means? The men drawn to serve in the NKVD, in the famous phrase of its founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, could be either saints or scoundrels – and clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths. But they were not aliens, not foreigners, but men, Russian men, made of the same tissue and fed by the same blood as their victims. ‘Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?’ asked Solzhenitsyn. ‘Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.’
This was the true, dark genius behind the Purge. Not simply to put two strangers into a room, one a victim, one an executioner, and convince one to kill the other, but to convince both that this murder served some higher purpose. It is easier to imagine that such acts are committed by monsters, men whose minds had been brutalized by the horrors of war and collectivization. But the fact is that ordinary, decent men and women, full of humanistic ideals and worthy principles, were ready to justify and even participate in the massacre of their fellows. ‘To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good,’ writes Solzhenitsyn. ‘Or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.’ This can happen only when a man becomes a political commodity, a unit in a cold calculation, his life and death to be planned and disposed of just like a ton of steel or a truckload of bricks. This, without doubt, was Bibikov’s belief. He lived by it, and died by it.
There was one part of the file that was closed to me. About thirty pages of the ‘rehabilitation investigation’, instigated by Khrushchev in 1955 as part of a wholesale review of the victims of the Purge, had been carefully taped together. After some persuasion, Panamaryev, as curious as I was, furtively un-taped them and we began quickly to leaf through the closed part of the file.
The forbidden pages concerned the NKVD men who had participated in the interrogation of Bibikov, Even half a century later, the Ukrainian Security Service was trying to protect its own. Their files had been ordered up by the investigators who prepared Bibikov’s rehabilitation. But the NKVD officers themselves could not be questioned, because by the end of 1938 they had themselves all been shot.
‘Former workers of the Ukrainian NKVD TEITEL, KORNEV and GEPLER… were tried for falsification of evidence and anti-Soviet activity,’ says one of the documents. ‘Investigators SAMOVSKI, TRUSHKIN and GRIGORENKO… faced criminal proceedings for counter-revolutionary activity,’ notes another.
Almost every person whose name appears in the file, from the accused and their NKVD interrogators to local Party Secretary Markitan, who signed the order to expel Bibikov from the Party two days after his arrest, were themselves killed within a year. The Purge had consumed its makers, and all that we are left of their lives are a few muffled echoes in a vast silence of paper.
The last document in the file, stamped and numbered, was a letter I had written to the Ukrainian Security Service that summer requesting to see my grandfather’s file, invoking a Ukrainian law which allows close relatives access to otherwise classified NKVD archives. The file had been carefully unbound by skilful hands and my letter stitched in and numbered with the rest, at the very back of the dossier. So the last signature in the fatal file, scrawled across the bottom of the letter, turned out to be my own.
4. Arrest
Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our Happy Childhood.
Slogan from a 1936 propaganda poster
Even after years in Moscow, I could never quite shake the feeling of being in a weird cat’s cradle of conflicting ages. There were quaintly historic touches: soldiers in jackboots and breeches; babushkas in headscarves; ragged, bearded beggars straight out of Dostoyevsky; obligatory coat checks and rotary phones; fur hats; drivers and maids; bread with lard; abacuses instead of cash registers; inky newspapers; the smell of wood smoke and outdoor toilets in the suburbs; meat sold from trucks piled with beef carcasses manned by a muzhik with a bloody axe. Some rhythms of life seemed absolutely unchanged from my father’s day, my grandfather’s day even.
There were a few moments when I think I caught glimpses of the nightmare world my grandfather entered in July 1937. For a few hours, I saw and smelt and touched it. It was enough, perhaps, to give a sense of what it was like, at least physically. What it was like in his head and heart is a place I never wish to visit.
One night in early January 1996, a month after I had visited Kiev to view my grandfather’s file, I was walking through a light snowfall towards the Metropole Hotel. I was trying to catch a taxi, and didn’t notice that three men were following me. The first I knew of their approach was the sleeve of a yellow sheepskin coat coming up at my face, followed by a powerful blow to the jaw. I felt no pain, just percussion, like a jolting train. For two or three minutes of strangely balletic time, I stood, I fell again, I scrambled up, as the men continued to beat me. I smelled the wet fur of my hat as I pressed it to my face to protect my nose.
Then I saw, as I lay on the street, the caked front wheels and dirty headlights of a red Lada crunching through the snow towards us. Improbably enough, a man with his left leg in a huge plaster cast levered himself out of the passenger door. He shouted something, and the three men looked suddenly embarrassed and began wandering away with looks of feigned innocence. The men in the car helped me up, then drove off.
At that moment, a police jeep rounded the corner. I flagged it down, opened the door, mumbled what had happened, and got in. At the moment we picked up speed down Neglinnaya Street in pursuit of the assailants, I suddenly felt my brain clear, and time suddenly shifted gears in tandem with the police driver from very slow to very fast. We pulled out on to Okhotny Ryad and I saw my assailants playing in the snow by the Lubyanka Metro. The jeep pulled a stylish power slide across eight lanes of traffic and skidded to a halt.
The three men were reaching for their passports, looking calm and happily drunk, smiling, thinking it was a routine document check. Two had the Asiatic features of Tatars, the third was a Russian. When they saw me clamber out of the jeep they froze and seemed to shrink a size.
‘Those are the men,’ I said, theatrically, pointing at them. The two Tatars were bundled into a tiny cage in the back of the jeep. No more than a dozen minutes had passed since they had begun beating me.
The police station was impregnated with the eternal Russian prison odour of sweat, piss and despair. The walls were pale institutional beige at the top and dark brown at the bottom. My two assailants sat in a cage in the corner of the reception room, their heads in their hands, muttering to each other and occasionally looking up at me.
The desk sergeant sat behind a Perspex screen, his little office raised a foot above the rest of the room. In front of him were several large, Victorian-looking ledgers, a set of stamps, a pile of forms, and an ashtray made out of a Fanta can. He took my details impassively, then picked up his telephone and dialled his superiors. From that moment, I think, the men’s fate was sealed. I was a foreigner, and that meant trouble for the police if the case wasn’t handled properly – consular complaints to the Foreign Ministry, paperwork flying.
The investigator appointed to the case was Svetlana Timofeyevna, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. She was a confident and matronly woman who sized me up with a shameless, penetrating stare, well used to separating men into wimps and loudmouths. She was one of those portly, invincible, middle-aged Russian women, whose kind lurked like Dobermanns in the front offices of all Russia’s great men; they ruled ticket offices and lorded it over hotel reception desks.
With great reverence, after we had been through the details several times verbally, Svetlana Timofeyevna pulled out a blank sta
tement sheet headed Protokol, or official statement, and began to take down the official record of my testimony. I signed the bottom of each page and initialled each correction. Finally she reached for a blank folder headed Delo, or criminal case, and carefully filled in the accused’s details on its brown cardboard cover. The file had begun. From that moment on, I, my assailants, the investigators, were all its creatures.
For the next three days I staggered over to the police station at Svetlana Timofeyevna’s summons, groggy with mild concussion. The station was even more depressing in daylight, a low, two-storey concrete building in a courtyard full of dirty slush, litter bins and stray dogs. I met the policemen who had been with me on the night of the assault, and one of them assured me, in a confiding whisper, that ‘we made sure those guys are having an interesting time’. I felt a guilty thrill of revenge.
Between long, fitful sleeps in my sunless third-floor apartment and long afternoons in the station, it seemed that I had somehow slipped into a pungent underworld, where I endlessly watched the investigator’s pen crawling across reams of paper, my head throbbing, willing it to finish. I dreamt of it at night, a feverish frustration dream, obsessively focused on the crawling pen, the way it dented the cheap official paper, held by a disembodied hand and lit by harsh, institutional lamplight.
On the third day – but somehow it seemed like so much longer than three days, this waking-sleeping bureaucratic nightmare – I felt like an old-timer, trudging up the police station’s worn stairs, past the stinking officers’ toilet from which the seat had been stolen. I found Svetlana Timofeyevna in uniform for the first time since I’d met her.
Stalin's Children Page 6
