Thank goodness Anna didn’t notice Galya’s stupid, tactless slip when she said, ‘None of us is immortal.’ Imagine her being so crass as to apply Vera’s words to Stalin! She was getting old and losing her touch. Those were Vera’s exact words, when she was pregnant and they were all teasing her for getting caught out when she was forty. There she stood in her cotton maternity smock, smiling. Galya can see her now. They teased her, and Vera said, ‘Well, none of us is immortal.’ And then they laughed even more, and Vera said, ‘No, I don’t mean that, do I? What’s the right word?’
‘Infallible?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
Immortal! No, you weren’t that. My dear friend – my dearest friend – there’s never been anyone else to touch you, thinks Galya now, remembering how she stooped to kiss Vera in her coffin. How cold she was then, and how hard. They were both women who were used to death, being doctors, but Galya has never been able to forget that kiss on Vera’s iron brow. And the little baby, Kolya it was then, in Anna’s arms …
She sighs. They are all here, even though Anna doesn’t see them. Vera, Mikhail, baby Kolya, Anna herself tumbling on the floor like a puppy, with Yura.
Yura is laughing. Today Galya can see his face plainly, just as it was. That doesn’t always happen, so this is a good day.
Anna doesn’t see or hear any of them. She’s too young. She’s got her life to live yet. And now there’s this new little one, Nadezhda, Vera’s grandchild.
None of us is immortal. But look, my darling. Look at that baby.
‘Galya, would you pass me my sketchbook?’
The sketchbook is on the corner of the kitchen table. Anna leaves it there most of the time, and picks it up when she has a moment. She draws only the smallest things. An onion top, or a crumpled dishcloth. She draws birch twigs that Galya has brought inside so that they will open their leaves in the warmth of the stove. She draws bits of bark, and the marks on the wall.
Yesterday, when she was changing the baby, Anna reached out for the sketchbook. Without thinking, and in a few seconds, she drew the baby’s foot.
Anna opens the sketchbook. It is beginning to fill up. These are not good drawings, because she is rusty. She’s allowed herself to lose the discipline that says, Draw every day, no matter how you feel. She’s hung back, hovering over the quality of her work until she does none at all.
You need only draw the smallest things. Not the whole world; don’t try for that. Anna picks up her pencil and draws the line of Nadezhda’s cheek.
She will draw every day. There will be a record.
There are no miracles, but for a second she believes that one day Andrei will see his child.
27
In March 1953, following the death of Stalin, an amnesty of Gulag prisoners was initiated by Lavrentii Beria. More than 1,200,000 prisoners serving sentences of five years or less were released. However, few political prisoners were released under this amnesty, since most of them had been sentenced to terms well above five years. In addition, the amnesty excluded those convicted of ‘counterrevolutionary crimes’.
Over the next few years, case reviews and rehabilitations of political prisoners swelled from a trickle to a flood, although this never became, as Nikita Khrushchev later said he had feared, ‘a flood which would drown us all’. Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Politburo for more than thirty years, observed that it would be impossible to declare at once that all the former ‘enemies of the people’ were innocent, because that would make it clear that ‘the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters’.
In April 1953, Pravda announced that an investigatory committee set up by Beria had found that ‘illegal methods’ had been used by the MGB to extract confessions from the doctors accused of taking part in the ‘Doctors’ Plot’. These doctors were exonerated, and, if still alive, released. The guilty MGB officials were arrested. Pravda’s editorial on this policy reversal promised that the Soviet Government would respect the constitutional rights of Soviet citizens.
During the years following the death of Stalin, thousands upon thousands of prisoners began to make their way back from Siberia across the vast expanses of the Soviet Union. Among them was Andrei.
Select Bibliography
The following books and articles were especially valuable to me during the writing of this book. The Betrayal also draws on research undertaken for The Siege (for more detail, please see the Select Bibliography for that novel). I am deeply grateful to all these sources.
BOOKS
The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War by Nikolai Krementsov, University of Chicago Press, 2002
Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Oxford University Press, 2004
Stalin and His Hangmen: An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him by Donald Rayfield, Penguin, 2004
Stalinism: New Directions (Rewriting Histories), ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Routledge, 2000
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Oxford University Press, 2000
Tear Off the Masks: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia by Sheila Fitzpatrick, Princeton University Press, 2005
Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin by Jochen Hellbeck, Harvard University Press, 2006
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003
The Unknown Stalin by Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, trans. Ellen Dahrendorf, I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2003
Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 by Geoffrey Roberts, Yale University Press, 2007
Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctors’ Plot by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov, John Murray, 2003
The Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security 1939–1953 by Michael Parrish, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996
Bolshevik Wives: A Study of Soviet Elite Society by James Peter Young, PhD thesis, Department of Government and International Relations, Sydney University, 2008
Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag, ed. Simeon Vilensky, Virago, 1999
Into the Whirlwind by Evgenia S. Ginzburg, trans. Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari, Penguin, 1968
Within the Whirlwind by Evgenia S. Ginzburg, trans. Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari, Harvill Press, 1989
Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons by Veronica Shapovalov, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001
Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps by Anne Applebaum, Allen Lane, 2003
Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia by Catherine Merridale, Granta, 2000
The Whisperers: Private Life in Soviet Russia by Orlando Figes, Allen Lane, 2007
Kolyma Tales, by Varlam Shalamov, trans. John Glad, Penguin Classics, 1994
Red Miracle: The Story of Soviet Medicine by Edward Podolsky, Books for Libraries Press, 1972
Daily Life in the Soviet Union by Katherine Bliss Eaton, Greenwood Press, 2004
Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia 1890–1991 by Catriona Kelly, Yale University Press, 2007
Writing the Siege of Leningrad by Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002
The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myths, Memories and Monuments by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Cambridge University Press, 2006
Nursing the Surgical Patient, ed. Rosemary Pudner, Elsevier Health Sciences, 2005
ARTICLES
‘Building the Blockade: New Truths in Survival Narratives from Leningrad’ by Jennifer Dickinson, University of Michigan, in Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Autumn 1995
‘Lifting the Siege: Women’s Voices on Leningrad, 1941–1944’ by Cynthia Simmons, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1998
Pravda, 13 January 1953
‘Above-knee Amputation’ by Paul Sugarbaker, Jacob Bickels and Martin Malawer in Musculoskeletal Cancer Surgery: Treatment of Sarcom
as and Allied Diseases, ed. Martin M. Malawer and Paul H. Sugarbaker, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001
‘Survival Data for 648 Patients with Osteosarcoma Treated at One Institution’ by Henry J. Munkin, MD; Francis J. Hornicok, MD, PhD; Andrew E. Rosenberg, MD; David C. Harmon, MD; and Mark C. Gebhardt, MD, in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, No. 429
‘How to Wrap an Above-the-knee Amputation Stump’ by Denise D. Hayes in Nursing, January 2003
‘Secondary Lung Tumors’ by Rebecca Bascom, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine, Pennsylvania State College of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center
I am grateful to Memorial (International Historical-Enlightenment, Human Rights and Humanitarian Society Memorial) and to The Shalamov Society.
I owe a lifelong debt to the works of Anna Akhmatova, Isaak Babel, Olga Berggolts, Alexander Blok, Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Gumilev, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Marina Tsvetayeva, Alexander Tvardovsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Mikhail Zoshchenko and many more than I can name here.
No contemporary bibliography is complete without reference to the wealth of material now available on the internet. To give just a few examples, I was able to listen to a recording of Radio Moscow’s announcement of Stalin’s death; view declassified Top Secret CIA papers from 1953 that relate to the death of Stalin and to the Doctors’ Plot; and consult research into the health and fertility of women who survived starvation during the Siege of Leningrad. Such access would have seemed incredible in the late 1990s, when I was writing The Siege.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Dedication
The Betrayal
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Select Bibliography
Books
Articles
Betrayal Page 37
