The Whisperers
Page 78
The Soviet narrative offered a different type of consolation, assuring the victims that their sacrifices had been in the service of collective goals and achievements. The idea of a common Soviet purpose was not just a propaganda myth. It helped people to come to terms with their suffering by giving them a sense that their lives were validated by the part they had played in the struggle for the Soviet ideal.
The collective memory of the Great Patriotic War was very potent in this respect. It enabled veterans to think of their pain and losses as having a larger purpose and meaning, represented by the victory of 1945, from which they took pride. The historian Catherine Merridale, who conducted interviews with veterans in Kursk for her book on the Soviet army in the war, found that they did not speak about their experiences with bitterness or self-pity, but accepted all their losses stoically, and that ‘rather than trying to relive the grimmest scenes of war, they tended to adopt the language of the vanished Soviet state, talking about honour and pride, of justified revenge, of motherland, Stalin, and the absolute necessity of faith’. As Merridale explains, this identification with the Soviet war myth was a coping mechanism for these veterans, enabling them to live with their painful memories:
Back then, during the war, it would have been easy enough to break down, to feel the depth of every horror, but it would also have been fatal. The path to survival lay in stoical acceptance, a focus on the job at hand. The men’s vocabulary was businesslike and optimistic, for anything else might have induced despair. Sixty years later, it would have been easy again to play for sympathy or simply to command attention by telling bloodcurdling tales. But that, for these people, would have amounted to a betrayal of the values that have been their collective pride, their way of life.57
People who returned from the labour camps similarly found consolation in the Stalinist idea that, as Gulag labourers, they too had made a contribution to the Soviet economy. Many of these people later looked back with enormous pride at the factories, dams and cities they had built. This pride stemmed in part from their continued belief in the Soviet system and its ideology, despite the injustices they had been dealt, and in part, perhaps, from their need to find a larger meaning for their suffering. In Within the Whirlwind Ginzburg recalls her impression on her return to Magadan, a city which was built by her fellow prisoners in the Kolyma camps:
How strange is the heart of man! My whole soul cursed those who had thought up the idea of building a town in this permafrost, thawing out the ground with the blood and tears of innocent people. Yet at the same time I was aware of a sort of ridiculous pride… How it had grown, and how handsome it had become during my seven years of absence, our Magadan! Quite unrecognizable. I admired each street lamp, each section of asphalt, and even the poster announcing that the House of Culture was presenting the operetta The Dollar Princess. We treasure each fragment of our life, even the bitterest.58
Norilsk, July 2004
In Norilsk this pride continues to be strongly felt among the older segments of the city’s population (approximately 130,000 people), which consists largely of former Gulag prisoners and their descendants, with a small minority of former labour camp administrators and voluntary workers, whose families remained in this Arctic settlement after the Gulag was dismantled. Many people stayed on because they had nowhere else to go. After 1953, when the administration of the industrial complex was transferred from the Gulag to the Ministry of Heavy Industry, the people of Norilsk were fully integrated into all the usual institutions of Soviet rule (schools, Pioneer and Komsomol organizations, Party cells and so on), which helped to create a Soviet consciousness – and to some extent a local Soviet patriotism based on their pride in Norilsk – that overlaid the memory of the Gulag. To this day, the town is celebrated in song and story. People still sing:
Here is a town which is called Norilsk,
We dig for nickel and copper.
Here the people have a strong spirit,
In Russia everybody knows about Norilsk.
Books and films commemorate the men and women who braved the elements to build Norilsk, often glossing over the fact that most of them were prisoners (in this haunted city, where survival is forgetting, the memory of the Gulag is kept just beneath the surface of public consciousness). Pride in the town is connected with the romantic and pioneering spirit of Arctic exploration, which continues to find expression in the popular idea that a special strength of spirit is required to survive the harsh conditions of Norilsk:
People here are made of special stuff.
The weak at once will run away.
There is no place for them in this harsh land,
Where the winds blow, And snowstorms rage,
And there is no summer.59
There is also a popular belief that the people in the town have a special warmth and sense of comradeship born from the shared experience of the Gulag and the common struggle to survive in these conditions. But above all this civic pride is rooted in the labour of the people of Norilsk, like Vasily Romashkin, a town hero, who in 2004, was still living there with his children and grandchildren.
Vasily Romashkin, 2004
Vasily was born in 1914 to a peasant family in the Moscow region, arrested as a ‘kulak’in 1937, and imprisoned in Norilsk from 1939, where he remained in the mining complex –first as a prisoner and then as a ‘voluntary worker’ – until his retirement in 1981. Vasily has been decorated many times for his labour in Norilsk. Even as a prisoner, he was known as a real Stakhanovite. He is particularly proud of his contribution to the Soviet war effort, as he explains in an interview:
These medals are all for winners [of Socialist Competitions] – Winner of Metallurgy, Winner of the Ninth Five Year Plan [1971–5]… I forget what that one is… And these ones are ‘Veteran of the [Norilsk] Complex’and ‘Veteran of the USSR’ – for valiant and dedicated labour. And this one is a jubilee medal for veterans of the Great Patriotic War, when the complex was militarized… I am proud of the part I played in the war –I carried out my patriotic duty as a citizen.60
Vasily speaks for the older generation which celebrates the labour camp’s contribution to the Soviet economy, especially in the war, when the precious metals which they dug in freezing temperatures were essential for the Soviet victory. This sense of achievement is partly what they mean when they declare their love for the ‘beauty’ of Norilsk, as they often do, a city which they built with their own hands (no one seems to notice that its atmosphere is permanently poisoned with toxic yellow fumes in which no trees can grow). ‘It is a beautiful city,’ declares Olga Iaskina, who was imprisoned in the Norilsk labour camp in the early 1950s and never left the town. ‘It is our little Leningrad.’61 Many of the buildings in the centre are indeed built in the neo-classical style of St Petersburg (another city constructed by slaves). Norilsk represents a startling paradox: a large industrial city built and populated by Gulag prisoners, whose civic pride is rooted in their own slave labour for the Stalinist regime.
A similar paradox underlies the popular nostalgia for Stalin, which more than half a century after the dictator’s death continues to be felt by millions of people, including many of his victims. According to a survey carried out by the All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion in January 2005, 42 per cent of the Russian people wanted the return of a ‘leader like Stalin’ (60 per cent of the respondents over sixty years of age were in favour of a ‘new Stalin’).62 This nostalgia is only loosely linked with politics and ideology. For older people, who recall the Stalin years, it has more to do with the emotions invested in the remembrance of the past – the legendary period of their youth when the shops were full of goods, when there was social order and security, when their lives were organized and given meaning by the simple goals of the Five Year Plans, and everything was clear, in black and white, because Stalin did the thinking for them and told them what to do. For these people, nostalgia for ‘the good old days’ of Stalin reflects the uncertainty of their lives as pensioners,
particularly since the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991: the rising prices that put many goods beyond their means; the destruction of their savings by inflation; and the rampant criminality that frightened old people in their homes.
The people who succumbed to this nostalgia included not just those who had held a certain status – the vast army of Soviet officials and petty functionaries, camp guards, policemen, chauffeurs, railways clerks, factory and kolkhoz bosses, house elders and janitors, who looked back to the days when they had been connected, as ‘little Stalins’ in their own sphere of power, to the Great Leader in one continuous chain of command. But ordinary citizens were nostalgic as well, people who had no special place in the Stalinist regime, but whose lives had become entangled in its destiny. Mikhail Baitalsky recalls meeting one old Stalinist in the 1970s, a comrade from the Komsomol in the 1920s, who had risen to become a middle-level engineer in one of Stalin’s factories. The engineer remained a fanatical supporter of Stalin. He did not try to defend the dictator (he knew the facts), although there were many Stalinist assumptions, like the guilt of Tukhachevsky and other ‘enemies of the people’, which he still believed and refused to question. Baitalsky came to the conclusion that his old friend was clinging not to any Stalinist ideology, but rather to his ‘pride in the qualities which he himself had had in those young and ardent years’. He did not want to renounce the beliefs which he had held in the 1920s and 1930s, beliefs that had become a part of his own personality, and refused to admit that precisely those qualities had fostered ‘his internal readiness to accept everything, positively everything, up to and including the execution of his closest comrades’.63
Leonid Saltykov, 1985
This nostalgia was also not unknown to Stalin’s victims and their descendants. Leonid Saltykov was the son a priest who was shot in 1938. Leonid concealed the arrest of his father when he became a factory worker and then an engineer. In 1965, he joined the Party, ending up as the secretary of the Party Committee in the factory where he worked. Leonid was a fanatical supporter of Stalin all his life. He mourned Stalin’s death and kept a picture of him on his desk until his retirement from the factory in 1993. During interviews Leonid denied that Stalin was responsible for the mass arrests of the 1930s, including the arrest of his father:
Yes, my father suffered, and so did many others too, but Stalin was still better than any of the leaders that we have today. He was an honest man, even if the people around him were not… Don’t forget, thanks to him we won the war, and that is a great achievement. If today someone tried to fight a war like that, there would be no guarantee that Russia would win it, no guarantee. Stalin built our factories and our railways. He brought down the price of bread. He spurred us all to work because we knew that if we studied hard and went to an institute we were guaranteed a good job, and could even choose a factory. Everything depended on how hard you worked.64
Vera Minusova was seventeen years old when her father, a railway engineer in Perm, was arrested and shot in 1937, and since then, as she herself admits, she has lived in almost constant fear, despite the fact that she was married in 1947 to a senior Party official in Perm. During interviews in 2004, she was still afraid to talk about many subjects connected to the Terror, and at several points she insisted that the tape-recorders be turned off. In these interviews Vera looked back with nostalgia to the years of Stalin’s reign as a time when ‘the basic necessities of life were affordable to all’ and there was ‘more discipline and order than we have today’. Vera worked for over fifty years as a bookkeeper in the offices of the Soviet railway. She complained that people ‘do not
Vera Minusova at the Memorial Complex for Victims of Repression near Yekaterinburg, May 2003. The candle she has lit is by the name of her father (which is incorrectly spelt)
want to work today’ and claimed that it was better during Stalin’s time, when ‘everyone was made to work’.
Discipline is fundamental. You have to keep the people under control, and use the whip if necessary. Today they should go back to the methods Stalin used. You can’t have people coming late for work, or leaving when they want. If they want the job they should be made to work according to the rules.65
Iraida Faivisovich was four years old when both her parents, the hairdressers from Osa, were arrested and sent to the Gulag in 1939. During interviews in 2003, she too argued that life was better under Stalin. ‘People did not kill each other in the streets! It was safe then to go out at night.’ According to Iraida, political leaders were honest during Stalin’s day: ‘Of course, there were sometimes shortages of food or clothes, but on the whole they delivered on their promises.’ Like many older people who grew up in a communal apartment, Iraida misses the collectivism of those years, which she remembers as a happier existence compared to her lonely life as a pensioner:
Life under Stalin was spiritually richer – we lived more peacefully and happily. Because we were all equally poor, we didn’t place much emphasis on material values but had a lot of fun – everything was open, everything was shared, between friends and families. People helped each other. We lived in each other’s rooms and celebrated holidays with everyone together on the street. Today every family lives only for itself.
People then had greater hope and meaning in their lives, Iraida says:
We believed that the future would be good. We were convinced that life would get better, if we worked well and honestly… We didn’t imagine that we were creating heaven on earth but we did think that we were building a society where there would be enough for everyone, where there would be peace and no more wars… That belief was genuine, and it helped us to live, because it meant that we concentrated on our education and our work for the future instead of on our material problems. We took more pride in our work then than we do today. It is hard to live without beliefs. What do we believe in today? We have no ideals.66
4
Nostalgia notwithstanding, the ruinous legacies of the Stalinist regime continued to be felt by the descendants of Stalin’s victims many decades after the dictator’s death. It was not only a question of lost relationships, damaged lives and families, but of traumas passed from one generation to the next.67*
From her parents, both executed in 1937, Elizaveta Delibash inherited a life-long fear of the Soviet authorities, which she passed down to her children. Brought up by her grandparents in Tbilisi and then by her aunt, an ardent Stalinist, in Leningrad, Elizaveta had overcome that fear in her teenage years by joining the Komsomol and becoming a student activist. She studied hard and got high grades at school, enabling her to enrol as a language student at Leningrad University in 1947. But her fear never went away. ‘I always felt inferior and unsure of myself because of what had happened to my parents,’ she recalls. ‘All my life I had this inner fear, a sense of loss and vulnerability, a feeling that I was not fully worthy as a human being, and that at any moment I could be insulted or humiliated by people in authority.’ Fearing her arrest in Leningrad, Elizaveta abandoned her ambitions of graduate research and fled to Krasnodar, a quiet town in the Kuban, where she worked as a schoolteacher until 1954, when she returned to Leningrad with her husband, a physics student called Iosif Liberman, and got a job as a librarian.
Iosif came from a Jewish family in Leningrad that quietly dissented from the Soviet regime. The contrast with the orthodox opinions of her aunt was a revelation for Elizaveta, who, encouraged by the revelations of the Twentieth Party Congress, began to think more critically about the events surrounding her parents’ disappearance. In 1958, she finally discovered that they had both been shot. It was a shock because she had hoped that her mother might still be alive and had always looked to the Great Bear in the night sky, as her mother had advised her in her final letter from the Solovetsky labour camp, as a symbol of that hope. The discovery intensified Elizaveta’s sense of alienation from the Soviet system. She and Iosif fell in with the opposition student group started up by Mikhail Molostvov, arrested and exiled from Leningrad in 1958
. They were part of Iosif Brodsky’s circle, the Leningrad poet who was put on trial for ‘parasitism’ in 1964 and sentenced to five years of exile in the North (a sentence commuted in 1965 after protests from around the world). In the later 1960s they had close connections to the refuseniks, Soviet Jews denied an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union, whose protests became an important part of the human rights movement.
All this time, Elizaveta lived in fear. She was afraid for Iosif, who was not awarded his doctoral degree (qualifying him for an academic salary) for many years after the completion of his dissertation – a relatively small punishment for his involvement in opposition circles but one that retained the threat of worse to come. Elizaveta became increasingly withdrawn. She was afraid for her children, Aleksandr (born in 1955) and Anna (1960). Elizaveta lived a ‘secret life’, terrified that her dissident convictions would lead to her arrest and deprive her children of a mother, as she herself had been when she was a child. ‘The loss of my mother was the strongest feeling in my life,’ she recalls. ‘It made me frightened for my own children.’