The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  Pride in being a Soviet citizen was probably never as all-embracing and intense as it is today. Pride in the ‘good qualities’ of the Soviet people, in the fine Soviet aeroplanes, in the good Soviet scientists and sailors and all the rest, pride in Bolshevism, which showed the supreme power of its ideas and organization on those icebergs. And what power that must have for the education of children!

  Rada’s political education was a constant concern in these letters. ‘Mama was always writing about how Communism should be built,’ recalls Rada.

  She wanted me to become an engineer and a writer… And her letters had an influence on me. Although I was brought up by my grandmother, I liked to think that, through these letters, I was being brought up by my mother too.124

  Tatiana wanted Rada to grow up as a Communist. She spilled a sea of ink on commentaries about her behaviour at home (which she said she had read about ‘in the newspapers’ to avoid revealing Feoktista as her source).

  12 June 1935

  And how are our household duties going, my little monkey? In the newspapers they write that you do your household chores without much pleasure and often forget what has to be done. But they also write other things. I read this telegram in Izvestiia: ‘Moscow (TASS) – the shockworker and model student Rada, 11, today was asked to clean the dishes and the kitchen. The task was fulfilled very well. The dishes were cleaned and everything tidied. Rada surveyed the results of her labour with great satisfaction and told our correspondent that from now on she will fulfil all her chores to the same standards of excellence.’ The correspondent approved, of course, and so do I. Study, little monkey, cook, wash, clean, as you are asked: the main thing is to do as you are asked.

  The longer Tatiana remained in prison, the more her letters were preoccupied by family relationships. Mikhail was not allowed to write to Moscow, but he was allowed to correspond with Tatiana, whose letters thus became the only means of information for Rada about her father, and for Mikhail about his daughter. Reflecting on her mother’s letters, Rada believes that they allowed Tatiana to maintain the family connections she needed to survive. They were ‘full of optimism’, Rada

  Letter (extract) from Tatiana to Rada, 12 June 1935

  writes in her memoirs; ‘she was always reminding us that time was passing, and was always looking forward to the happy time when the family would be together once again’. Many of Tatiana’s prison letters came with little gifts – rag dolls, toy animals and even clothes – which she had made for Rada in the prison camp.125

  On her release from the Verkhneuralsk prison in 1936, Tatiana was exiled to Uralsk and then to Alma-Ata. Feoktista spent two weeks with Tatiana in Uralsk in March 1936. These were precious weeks for Tatiana, who later wrote of a new intimacy she experienced with her mother when they sat together, ‘my head resting on your shoulder’, and talked about the past.126 Shortly after Feoktista’s return to Moscow, Tatiana wrote: ‘Mamusenka! I came home but this is not a home. You are not here, there is no home [written in English] – no cosy warmth.’ In April, when Tatiana moved to Alma-Ata, she began to pin her hopes on the possibility of Rada coming to be with her. She invested all her energies in organizing the move. Her letters from this time were filled with hopes and excitement, as Rada writes: ‘Her stubborn strength and persistence were completely focused on the tasks of finding work and a little room where she could live with her daughter.’ The trip did not materialize. In June 1936, just as Rada was about to leave Moscow to join her mother in Alma-Ata, Tatiana was rearrested and sent to an unknown labour camp. ‘We bought the train tickets to Alma-Ata,’ recalls Rada,

  we found some people to look after me on the journey, packed all my things and sent a telegram with details about my arrival. The answer came: ‘The addressee does not live here.’ We returned the ticket. I stayed in Moscow and never saw my mother again.

  Tatiana was sent to Kolyma, one of the worst of Stalin’s Gulag colonies. In November 1937, she was shot. Mikhail was executed in Karelia during the same month. His correspondence with his wife (a ‘Trotskyist’) was recorded in his NKVD file as sufficient proof of guilt to sentence him to death.127

  Rada did not know about her parents’ death. She tried not to think about them, because she did not know if they were alive or not. But once she saw her mother in a dream:

  To start with I was on the deck of a ship in the middle of the sea. In my hands I held two schoolbooks covered in glued-on brown paper. I opened one of them and recognized my mother’s handwriting. The first sentence was very strange: ‘When you read these lines, I will already be at the bottom of the sea…’ I read a few more lines, which I can’t recall. Then I became gripped with fear. There were enormous pipes with water gushing out. My fear increased, seizing hold of me, until I awoke.128

  Rada believed the ‘message’ of her dream – that her mother had been drowned – and began to think about her all the time. Later, when she heard tales from Kolyma survivors about a ship of prisoners that had gone down, she was even more convinced of her mother’s fate. She continued to believe her dream for many years and, even after she received a death certificate from the authorities stating that her mother had been shot, Rada went on thinking that she had been drowned.

  Tatiana Poloz was not the only fervent socialist who felt the pull of family after imprisonment. Nikolai Kondratiev was born in 1892 to a peasant family in Kostroma province, 400 kilometres north-east of Moscow. He studied economics at St Petersburg University, joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and played a leading role in formulating the agrarian reforms of 1917. In the 1920s, Kondratiev was a prominent economist advising the Soviet government. He was a firm supporter of the NEP, favouring the primacy of agriculture and the manufacturing of consumer goods over the development of heavy industry. It was at this time that he advanced his theory of long-term cycles in the capitalist economy (‘Kondratiev waves’) which made him famous throughout the world. But with the overturning of the NEP Kondratiev was removed from all his posts. In July 1930, he was arrested on charges of belonging to an illegal (and probably non-existent) ‘Peasant Labour Party’. Stalin wrote to Molotov: ‘Kondratiev and a few other scoundrels must definitely be shot.’129 But in fact Kondratiev was sentenced to eight years in the special isolation prison camp housed in the fourteenth-century Spaso-Yefimeyev Monastery in Suzdal, where he was imprisoned from February 1932.

  Kondratiev’s health deteriorated rapidly. He was in and out of the prison hospital with complaints of severe headaches, dizziness and intermittent deafness, chronic rheumatism in the legs, diarrhoea, vomiting, insomnia and depression. By 1936, he was practically blind. Yet Kondratiev carried on with his research and prepared five new books. He wrote over 100 letters to his wife, Yevgeniia,130 nearly all of them with little notes attached for his daughter Elena (‘Alyona’), who was born in 1925. The pain of separation which Kondratiev felt is almost palpable in these letters. It is his daughter that he misses most. The situation was all the more poignant because Kondratiev was obviously such a loving father. He desperately wanted to play an active role in his daughter’s upbringing, and the worst part of his suffering in jail was not being able to do this. ‘How terrible that she is growing up in my absence,’ he wrote to Yevgeniia in March 1932. ‘This torments me more than anything.’131 As a father, Nikolai poured all his love into his letters to Elena. When she did not write to him, he reproached her for not loving him enough. Nikolai would constantly remind her of little incidents from their life together before his arrest. He drew pictures in his letters and told her stories about the wildlife around the monastery – birds that came to visit him, foxes he had seen. In many of his letters Nikolai included pressed flowers, or grasses from the meadows near the monastery. Above all, he focused his attention on his daughter’s intellectual development. He set her riddles and puzzles. He recommended books for her to read, asking her to write with her impressions about them. He encouraged her to keep a diary, corrected the mistakes in her letters and nagged her to �
��write neatly and always try to do things well’.132 On the bottom of many of his letters a young child has written the word: ‘Papa’. They were all Elena had of him. She grew up to become a botanist, a professor of Moscow University. Perhaps her father’s letters influenced her interest in botany.

  Nikolai and Elena (‘Alyona’) Kondratiev, 1926

  In 1935, Nikolai sent Elena a fairy-tale which he had written and illustrated to mark her name day.133 ‘The Unusual Adventures of Shammi’ tells the story of a kitten who goes in search of the ideal land, where ‘people, animals and plants live in happiness and harmony’. Shammi sets off with his friend, the tomcat Vasia, who is very cowardly and reluctant to go. On the way they encounter many animals who try to dissuade them from going on, promising them happiness if they give up the search, but Shammi pushes ahead, attracting various animals – a goat, a donkey, a horse and a hen – who ‘all work hard and want a better life’. But soon the travellers lose their way. They begin to argue among themselves. Some get eaten by a crocodile. Others are shot by hunters in the wood.

  On 31 August 1938 Kondratiev wrote to his daughter:

  ‘The Unusual Adventures of Shammi’ (detail)

  My sweet darling Alyonushka.

  Probably your holidays are over now and you are back at school. How did you spend the summer? Did you get stronger, put on weight, get tanned? I very much want to know. And I would like very, very much to see you and kiss you many, many times. I still do not feel well, I am still ill. My sweet, Alyonushka, I want you not to get sick this winter. I also want you to study hard, as you did before. Read good books. Be a clever and a good little girl. Listen to your mother and never disappoint her. I would also be happy if you managed not to forget about me, your papa, altogether. Well, be healthy! Be happy! I kiss you without end. Your papa.134

  This was the last letter. Shortly afterwards, on 17 September, Nikolai was executed by a firing squad.

  4

  The Great Fear

  (1937–8)

  1

  Julia Piatnitskaia did not know what to think when her husband was arrested on the night of 7 July 1937. Osip Piatnitsky was a veteran Bolshevik, a member of the Party from its foundation and one of Lenin’s most trusted comrades. In an article in Pravda to mark Piatnitsky’s fiftieth birthday, in January 1932, Lenin’s widow Krupskaia had described him as a ‘typical revolutionary-professional who gave himself entirely to the Party, and lived only for its interests’. It was hard for Julia to understand how Osip could have become an ‘enemy of the people’. She was a committed Bolshevik, but she did not know whether to believe the Soviet press, which had named Piatnitsky as a ‘traitor’ and a ‘spy’, or the man she had loved for nearly twenty years. Osip was the father of her two children, but after his arrest she was no longer certain if she really knew her husband. ‘Who is Piatnitsky?’ Julia wrote in her diary. ‘A true revolutionary or a scoundrel?… Either could be true. I do not know. That is the most agonizing thing.’1

  Julia had met Osip in 1920, when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-nine. Julia was born into a Russian-Polish family in Vladimir. Her mother was a Polish noblewoman who had broken all the customs of her caste and religion by marrying a Russian Orthodox priest without her parents’ permission. Julia, who was six when her mother died, inherited her romantic and rebellious temperament. Passionate and beautiful, at the age of just sixteen Julia ran away from her father’s home to enrol as an nurse in the Russian army during the First World War. She married a young general, who disappeared in action in 1917. During the Civil War, Julia joined the Bolsheviks. She worked for the Red Army as a spy, infiltrating the military headquarters of Admiral Kolchak, the White Army leader on the Eastern Front. Eventually, her cover was blown. Narrowly escaping with her life, she fled to Moscow, had a nervous breakdown, and while recovering in a hospital met Osip, who was visiting a friend. Julia was highly strung and volatile, emotional and poetic. She had a strong sense of justice, rooted in her strict religious upbringing, which profoundly influenced her politics. She was kind and warm, adored by everyone who met her, according to the daughter of one of Osip’s comrades. ‘We children were always calm in her presence. When she was there, we forgot our worries… She was always full of life.’2

  Osip, by contrast, was stern and taciturn. A stocky man, with soft, attractive features, he was a model of the professional revolutionary. Modest to the point of selflessness, he rarely talked about his private life (many of his oldest Party comrades had no idea he had a family). Osip had been one of the most important activists in the Marxist underground before 1917. He was in charge of smuggling illegal literature between Russia and Europe. He spent a great deal of time abroad, especially in Germany, where he was known by the pseudonym ‘Freitag’ (Friday), or ‘Piatnitsa’ in Russian, from which the name Piatnitsky was derived (his real Jewish surname was Tarshis). When he married Julia, Osip was the Secretary of the Moscow Party’s Central Committee. But he was soon transferred to the Comintern, the international organization of the Communist Party, where he ran the crucial Organization Department and effectively became the leader of the entire Comintern. Piatnitsky oversaw a huge expansion in the Comintern’s activities, as it tried to spread the Revolution to all corners of the world. His Memoirs of a Bolshevik (1926), a handbook of the Party’s organizational and ethical principles, was translated into more than twenty languages. Piatnitsky was exhausted by his work. ‘I was in the Comintern from morning until night,’ he recalled.3 In the middle of the 1920s – when he was still in his early forties – his hair went white and then fell out.

  Osip’s work also placed a heavy burden on his family life. The Piatnitsky apartment in the House on the Embankment was always full of foreign visitors. Osip missed out on the childhood of his two young sons, Igor (born in 1921) and Vladimir (in 1925). His constant absence was a source of many arguments with Julia, who also became increasingly disillusioned with the bourgeoisification of the Party and Stalin’s dictatorship during the 1930s. Igor recalls an argument between his parents – it must have been in 1934 – when she began to recite in a loud and angry voice the seditious verses of the early nineteenth-century poet Dmitry Venivitinov:

  The dirt, the stench, the cockroach and the flea

  And everywhere the presence of his lordly hand

  And all those Russians who babble constantly –

  All this we must call our holy fatherland.

  Osip and Julia (seated on the right of the front step) with their sons Igor (next to Osip) and Vladimir Piatnitsky (on Julia’s knee) and neighbours’ children at their dacha near Moscow, late 1920s

  Terrified of their neighbours overhearing, Osip pleaded with his wife: ‘Keep your voice down, Julia!’4

  By 1935, Piatnitsky’s standing in the Comintern had made him known to Communists throughout the world (Harry Pollitt, the British Communist, said that Piatnitsky was the Comintern). At this time, Stalin’s foreign policy was geared towards the containment of Nazi Germany by strengthening relations with the Western democratic states (‘collective security’). In 1934, the Soviet Union had even joined the League of Nations, which it had denounced only two years previously as an ‘imperialist conspiracy’. The Comintern was subordinated to this foreign policy. Led by its new General Secretary, the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern’s task was now to build alliances with the European socialists and steer them into coalition governments (‘Popular Fronts’) with the centre parties to counteract the Fascist threat. The policy had some success in France and Spain, where Popular Front governments were elected in 1936. But there were critics of this strategy within the Comintern, among them Piatnitsky. Many Communists, including former members of the Left Opposition led by Trotsky in the 1920s, saw it as a betrayal of the international revolutionary cause, which in their view could only be advanced by ‘United Fronts’ of Communists and socialists, excluding the centre parties of the bourgeoisie; they found common cause with former members of the more moderate Right Opp
osition, led by Rykov and Bukharin, who were increasingly opposed to Stalin’s abuse of power. Both these groups regarded Stalin as a ‘counter-revolutionary’.By 1936, the Comintern was full of whispered discontent with Stalin’s foreign policies. Leftists linked the Stalinist rapprochement with the Western powers to the bourgeoisification of the Soviet elite. Deeply committed to the ideal of world revolution, they were afraid that the Soviet Union, under Stalin’s leadership, was becoming not an inspiration to the proletarians of the West, but a guardian of order and security. They were particularly disillusioned by Stalin’s failure to give adequate support to the various left-wing defenders of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, when, in the autumn of 1936, General Franco’s Nationalists – with massive aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany – advanced to the outskirts of Madrid. Even some of Stalin’s loyal supporters sometimes found it hard to go along with what they saw as the betrayal of their ideological commitment to revolutionary internationalism. As one Old Bolshevik explained to William Bullitt, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, in 1935: ‘You must understand that world revolution is our religion and there is not one of us who would not in the final analysis oppose even Stalin himself if we should feel that he was abandoning the cause of world revolution.’5