The people who laid the bricks for the barns and houses must have thought they were creating something permanent, that they were taming nature. An electricity substation, built for the collective farm, had ‘1977’ set into its side in lighter-coloured bricks. You only put a date on the side of a building if you intend it to outlive you and speak to future generations. Perhaps the man who laid those bricks imagined children in a hundred years mouthing the numbers and being amazed by how old it was.
If he did, he will not be getting his wish. The bricks were rotting, and the mortar had fallen out. No wires led to it, and the roof was slipping off. Before long it would be another lump in the fields like the old camp morgue which Merzlikin led us past.
We walked through the village’s own cemetery with fresh graves and plastic flowers, down a slope and up into the trees. And here, the mosquitoes came in their thousands. The hum around my veil became a scream as we passed into the prisoners’ graveyard. Row after row of little metal signs, and occasionally a cross, marked the graves. Some of the humps had personal monuments erected since 1991 by relatives: Ukrainian names, mostly, and Lithuanians too.
But most graves had nothing to identify them. These were Russians, and their nation did not have the desire of the Ukrainians and Lithuanians to remember the victims of the Soviet Union as martyrs.
The records noting who is buried where are not perfect. Often people seeking to reinter a body find it does not belong to the person they’re looking for. A Lithuanian general – Jonas Juodišius – is buried here somewhere, having been imprisoned for being a Lithuanian general. When Lithuanians came to try to repatriate his remains, they could not find him, so they left him be and erected the monument on this foreign soil instead.
Hryhorii Lakota, a bishop from the Ukrainian Uniate Church, which is Orthodox by ritual but acknowledges the pope, was buried here too. His crime was his refusal to accept Russian Orthodoxy. He has been canonized, and his body moved to Kiev.
Moss and horsetails grew among the graves, and I traced the rows of humps, reading the few names that had been picked out for separate commemoration, while trying not to overlook the 99 per cent that had not. Here was Punin, Akhmatova’s lover and the man who did not share Karsavin’s warm feelings towards mosquitoes. And here was Karsavin too. Tanya stood by his grave, planning her memorial.
‘It is like a debt to my father and mother,’ she said. She had come a long way to repay it, and would be back next year to see it done.
We sat in the schoolroom and drank a bottle of vodka that Nikolai Andreyevich had brought. Then we ate our lunches. I was secretly pleased when Tanya asked for one of my sandwiches.
The year before, Merzlikin said, workmen had come to repair the school, which is an important building since children from remote villages have to live here as well as study. They had done a very poor job. He pointed to damp stains which had started in the corner of the room and now spread across much of the ceiling.
‘It was not like this before,’ he paused, for emphasis. ‘Before they repaired the roof. This building won’t last long now unless they come back and do it properly.’
I think we were all rather affected by our experience in the cemetery, though we had spent only an hour or so among the hundreds of graves, because Tanya and I got into a pointless squabble over whether British people or Russian people were more cultured. Perversely, we were each arguing the merits of the other’s nation. Merzlikin hovered around us, his kind eyes concerned by this inexplicable disagreement.
The vodka drunk, the sandwiches eaten, we walked back to catch our evening train. Nikolai Andreyevich continued his lecture on the journey back, and Tanya and I let it wash over us, tired out by the day. Despite my mosquito armour, I had rings of bites around both ankles, where they had found the weakness of the single layer of sock. I fingered them, trying to relieve the itching without scratching. There were nineteen bites on my left ankle, and seven on my right. My scalp felt like a moonscape beneath my hair. They had bitten through the cloth of my hat so many times I could not distinguish the individual bites. I was feeling unsteady.
‘You have the mosquito fever,’ said Nikolai Andreyevich. ‘It will pass.’
I had been in Abez for seven hours, and half of those had been inside, and I had mosquito fever and felt unsettled. Prisoners stayed up here for years.
Our carriage was hitched to the Moscow train, and I wanted to go and find my bunk and lie down and sleep, but I felt bound by politeness to sit on this hard seat for the two hours to Inta and listen to Nikolai Andreyevich.
‘There, that was a camp,’ he said, ‘there were 30,000 people living there.’ He pointed through the grimy window at an unremarkable stretch of tundra.
‘Up there was an aerodrome.’ He pointed to a slight rise above the track. ‘See see see see see the embankment. Now you will see a bridge.’ Pause. ‘There was another bridge there before.’
At last, at Inta, they left me to continue my journey alone, and I picked my way down the train to my bunk.
4
The generation of change
Back in Moscow, I recognized Alexander Ogorodnikov as soon as I saw him, although I had previously no idea what he looked like. The man walking towards me – tall, slim, bearded, rimless glasses – looked like a filmmaker, a ladies’ man or a Soviet dissident, and Ogorodnikov had been all three.
Mutual friends recommended Ogorodnikov to me as a man who could tell me about Moscow in the years after Father Dmitry had been released from prison, the years after Stalin’s death. I wanted to know how religious believers had been treated, and how they had behaved towards each other. We shook hands and he ushered me out of the cool of the station into the flaying heat of Moscow. If anything the city was even hotter now I was back from Abez. The tar melted like chocolate and the air throbbed on streets designed for parades not shade.
We stopped off in a supermarket, where he chose herring, biscuits, tea and bread before walking me to his home: a flat near the top of a nine-storey block. His kitchen window commanded a view of other nine-storey blocks and, in the distance, a factory chimney with four horizontal stripes.
He was curious to know why I wanted to talk to him and, when I told him, he said he too was planning a book about the 1960s and 1970s. For almost all Russians who remember the Soviet Union, those decades now glow like a golden age. Most people remember them for their stability, for holidays, jobs and even a degree of access to consumer goods. For the likes of Ogorodnikov, the memories are different: those were the heyday of Soviet dissent.
All over the world, the generation that grew up after World War Two proved rebellious and iconoclastic. The Soviet Union may not have seen the kind of protests witnessed in Paris, Prague or Chicago, but young people still tried to change the world in their own way. Poets, writers and historians like Solzhenitsyn circulated their work in illicit copies. When they were arrested, their friends publicized their trials and imprisonment with fresh home-printed pamphlets.
Older dissidents like Andrei Sakharov – a nuclear physicist whose anger at unnecessary Soviet bomb tests morphed into concern about the denial of rights to Soviet citizens – acted as a focus for younger men and women. They made contact with Western journalists and diplomats who helped them smuggle their writings out of the country. Everything they did ran counter to the direction desired by their government.
Some of their actions were deliberately high profile, such as a protest on Red Square by eight people against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They knew almost all their fellow citizens would criticize them, in the same way their fellow citizens criticized the Czechs for not being grateful for the Soviet army’s help in defeating the Nazis. One participant recorded how a pleasant-looking blonde woman saw their protest and joined in the chorus of ‘scum’ directed towards them.
‘People like you should be stamped out. Together with your children, so they don’t grow up as morons,’ the woman said.
But the protesters did not car
e. They wanted to show that not everyone in their country believed in force being used to defeat the popular uprising of the Prague Spring.
‘We had already crossed over to the other side. Freedom was the dearest thing on earth to us,’ a participant said, according to a book prepared later by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, one of her comrades.
Other dissidents favoured smaller actions: reading poems, collecting information on Stalin’s victims, studying their nation’s ancient traditions. Their discretion made little difference to the government, however, which saw them all as dangerous and used the police, the K G B, prosecutors and even psychiatrists against them.
The men who governed the country had all risen to the top under Stalin, when thousands of top officials were dragged off and shot as spies on the flimsiest of evidence. They found themselves in senior positions after the last major purges took place in 1937–8 and knew instinctively that innovation and free thought were dangerous. After all, everyone who had thought freely in the 1930s had been killed. Stability was the new spirit of the times. The rapid and bewildering changes of the 1930s and 1940s were over: the war was won, and the great new industrial cities were built.
After Stalin died in 1953, most of the gulag camps were closed. Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev felt able to condemn his methods, and tried to introduce a more humane form of communism, sacking incompetent and corrupt officials, altering the system, chivvying people along rather than murdering them.
In 1956, he gave what was called the Secret Speech, though its contents were known across the country and beyond in weeks. In it, he criticized Stalin’s cult of personality and the great purges of 1937 and 1938. He did not admit to all the regime’s crimes – perhaps because he was implicated in most of them – but it was still the first admission that the Soviet Union had done anything wrong, and it jolted communists all over the country.
Some 98 of the 139 members and candidates of the Central Committee elected at the 1934 party congress had been arrested and shot, he said. And 1,108 of 1,966 delegates at that congress had been arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes.
‘Many thousands of honest and innocent communists died as a result of this monstrous falsification of such “cases”, as a result of the fact that all kind of slanderous “confessions” were accepted, and as a result of the practice of forcing accusations against oneself and others,’ Khrushchev said, even singling out individual judges for censure. ‘He is a vile person, with the brain of a bird, and morally completely degenerate. And it was this man who decided the fate of prominent party workers,’ he said of one.
He urged ordinary communists and other Soviet citizens to believe that the party was now back on the right track, but the shock of finding out even a partial truth about what had happened caused many people to see the country with fresh eyes.
Leonid Plyushch, for example, was a member of a unit of the Young Communist League, targeting crime and prostitution. He was rocked by the Secret Speech, almost as much as he was when the head of his unit raped a prostitute.
‘I was a very active member of the Komsomol and a communist by conviction, but when I learned of the exposure of Stalin’s crimes it had a tremendous impact . . . I felt the ground had moved from under me, and then the idea: it should never happen again – which stayed with me for many years.’
Khrushchev attempted to allow such disoriented citizens to speak out, and even permitted the reality of the gulag to appear in print. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel of an ordinary peasant in the camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in November 1962. Khrushchev was mercurial, but this was concrete proof that he intended to open discussions on previously forbidden themes.
But all of this alienated the senior bureaucrats. They too had been implicated in Stalin’s crimes and felt Khrushchev was going too far. Besides, they disliked the prospect of being sacked and no longer feared rebelling if they would not be killed for it. Khrushchev had promised communism would be built, more or less, by 1980. But then he was forced out in 1964, and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who promised stability. Under Brezhnev, change stopped altogether. Communism was postponed and replaced by the concept of ‘developed socialism’. The state would not wither away, as Marx had predicted it would, for many many years. The party was needed to guide the revolution for the foreseeable future, which meant everyone got to keep their jobs. The class of 1937 dug in on the summit of the state. It would rule the Soviet Union until Mikhail Gorbachev. Young people were frustrated that their paths to promotion were blocked by increasingly old men.
Ogorodnikov was eager to start down the track of his life story but kept being derailed by the glorious confusion of his kitchen. His wife was trying to spoon soup into Andrei, their three-year-old, who had a mass of hair, no trousers and lots to say.
Then an Uzbek man arrived to discuss the reception centre for homeless men he and Ogorodnikov had set up. After a couple of minutes of that, we switched to police corruption. We all had anecdotes to tell, but the Uzbek beat us flat with a story about being randomly detained in Astrakhan and forced to work in the police chief’s garden for three days until his non-existent debt to society was deemed paid.
Lunch was soup and bread, and Ogorodnikov recited a long grace. He and the Uzbek then vanished to talk business, and I made faces at Andrei whenever he peeked around the corner of the corridor.
At last I had Ogorodnikov to myself: his wife went out, the Uzbek left, and Andrei lay down for a nap. I studied Ogorodnikov while he made more tea. He had the long hair and beard of an Orthodox priest but none of their over-ripe sleekness. He was born in 1950. He looked burned by the sun, and hardened by it.
‘My generation was the generation of the change. You understand,’ he started.
Growing up in the 1960s, the post-war children, he and his friends were part of the global wave of protest. Like their counterparts around the world, they were living in unprecedented prosperity and peace. Obviously, their wealth did not compare to that of contemporaries in North America or Western Europe. There was no mass ownership of cars for Soviet citizens, no transistor radios or cheap fashion. But they were still considerably more prosperous than their parents or grandparents had been. The generation before them had suffered the privations caused by World War Two. The generation before that had struggled through collectivization. Ogorodnikov and his friends had food and clothes, and could be proud of their country’s achievements: sputnik, Yuri Gagarin, the hydrogen bomb.
Ogorodnikov grew up in Chistopol, a little railway town on the edge of Siberia, and was not immediately a dissident. Indeed, as a child, he had no cause to complain about his life at all. He was far away from the rarefied world of Moscow intellectuals, and was a pure product of the Soviet system. If the country had a future it was in people like him: bright and committed. It took him a long time to rebel.
‘We were all raised in Soviet ideology,’ Ogorodnikov went on. ‘I was completely devoted to the Soviet idea and Marxism. For me, I had the ideals of communism. To understand how deep this went into me, when I was sixteen a girl wrote me a note, a love letter, in which she chided me, telling me that Pavka Korchagin would not have behaved the way I had done. And for her it was a real example of how to live.’
Korchagin was the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s socialist realist novel How the Steel was Forged, which presented a glorious narrative of the Bolshevik victory in the Civil War. Young Russians were inspired by his example to dream of building the new world order just as Westerners of the same generation were dreaming of running away and heading for the horizon like Jack Kerouac. Members of the Young Communist League signed up in their thousands to work on massive construction projects like the Baikal–Amur railway line. Many young Russians at the time would have jumped at the kind of offer Ogorodnikov received when he was eighteen: to hold a senior post in a Young Communist detachment helping build a new truck factory on a tributary of the Volga at Naberezhnye Chelny.
Through mass educat
ion, which reduced illiteracy from near universal to almost non-existent, the Soviet Union succeeded in inspiring its youth to great feats of effort. Stalin called writers the ‘engineers of the human soul’, and he was right. Books like Ostrovsky’s created a loyal army for the state, and Ogorodnikov at the time was completely unaware of how cleverly he had been indoctrinated by heroes such as Pavka Korchagin.
‘For me he was a serious realistic life model, you understand. She was condemning me by saying that I was not behaving like a revolutionary hero. This was my girlfriend, in a love letter.’
Ogorodnikov was bright, driven by the desire to improve his country and rescue it from its enemies. He joined the Pioneers – where children paraded in red neckerchiefs and boasted of being ‘Always Ready’ just like Boy Scouts in the West were told to ‘Be Prepared’ – and then the Young Communist League. But that was not enough for him and, aged fifteen, he and his friends formed the Young Communists’ Militant Wing. They wanted to clean up their rough railway town, where too many people drank and fought and swindled, far from Moscow’s watchful eye.
‘We fought with non-socialist remnants, with non-Soviet ways of life,’ he said, mocking the Soviet jargon. ‘There were these fops, these dandies, and we had a lot of authority. But don’t laugh; this was very serious. Two of my comrades were killed by bandits. They tried to kill me too. We risked our lives.’
On 15 November 1968, Komsomolskaya Pravda, the daily newspaper for Soviet youth, with millions of copies printed daily, devoted the centre of its front page to one of those deaths. Sasha Votyakov, the paper wrote, had remonstrated with two ‘boorish, arrogant, and drunken’ men who refused to buy bus tickets. They followed him off the bus and killed him.
‘Imagine what Komsomolskaya Pravda was, there were 60 million copies printed every day across the whole country, the youth paper. And imagine, there was an article about me on the first page with the headline “Valour Patrol”.’
The Last Man in Russia Page 9
