The Whisperers

by Orlando Figes

  As a mother, Elizaveta was excessively protective, according to Anna.* She did not tell her daughter about her family’s history. ‘It was a taboo subject throughout my childhood,’ Anna remembers. When she was fourteen, Anna found out from her brother that their grandparents had been shot in the Terror. But when she asked her mother about it, she was told that they had been killed during the war. Elizaveta kept the truth about her parents from her daughter until the glasnost period. As a child Anna was completely unaware that her parents were involved in opposition circles: ‘They protected me and kept me at a distance from their activities.’ She did not realize until the 1980s that many of her parents’ friends were dissidents, that Brodsky visited their apartment, or that the manuscripts her parents read were illegal samizdat.

  The one thing on which her mother always insisted was that she should study hard. ‘She drummed it into us that we had to try much harder than the other children at our school,’ recalls Anna, ‘because with our Jewish names we would be marked down.’ Anna felt this pressure as a burden, as if she was expected to make up for her mother’s interrupted studies after university: ‘God forbid, if I had ever failed to come in the top group at school. I was forced to be clever – I was not allowed to be anything else.’ Anna was forbidden to mix with children from proletarian backgrounds because her mother feared that they might pose a danger if her family’s history was revealed. ‘Looking back,’ reflects Anna, ‘I realize now that my mother wanted me to become friends with children from educated families that, like ours, had been repressed.’ Anna was brought up to be modest, not to put herself above the crowd, to be conformist, politically loyal, to join the Pioneers and the Komsomol, although instinctively she sensed that this obedience to the authorities was ‘purely for appearances’.

  Anna recognizes in herself a deep-seated fear, a lack of confidence and social inhibition, which she thinks are the inheritance of her mother’s upbringing:

  It is hard to say what the fear is, because I have felt it since I was a child. I am afraid of any sort of contact with bureaucracy… It is a fear of being humiliated… This was something I was taught when I was young, to retreat from any situation where my conduct could be criticized by the authorities… From my teenage years I was open among friends, but withdrawn socially… I was afraid to be with strangers and always tried not to stand out.

  Anna’s fear was menacing, but vague and ill-defined, because as a child she was never really told about her family’s repression. It hit her with full force only when she first became aware of the consequences of her spoilt biography. Anna recalls the moment well: she had said to one of her teachers that she would like to go to university, and he had questioned if she could, not because of her abilities, but because, as he explained, ‘they don’t give the highest marks to people with [Jewish] names like yours’. Anna became ‘hysterical’. This was the humiliation she had feared.

  To make it possible to go to university, where she studied tourism, Anna took her mother’s Georgian nationality rather than her father’s Jewish one when she registered for her Soviet passport. She joined the Komsomol, and then, when she became disillusioned by its ideology, stayed in, afraid that leaving it might get her into trouble with the university authorities. She took no interest in politics, never got involved with the dissidents, and though she claims she always knew that the Soviet system was unjust, she censored her own thoughts and interests, and never let herself behave in any way to raise suspicions about her loyalty.68

  This ‘genetic fear’, as Anna herself calls it, affected the children of Stalin’s victims in many different ways, from the friends they made at school to their choices of career. Vladimir Korsakov, for example, was born into an old intelligentsia family in Leningrad which suffered in the purges of the 1930s and 1940s. Deeply traumatized by his childhood memories of the siege of Leningrad, he turned down the chance of a career as a dancer in the Kirov Ballet in the late 1950s and went to work instead in the Baltic Factory, a huge shipbuilding and engineering plant, because even then, as he recalls, he was afraid of being stigmatized as the son of an ‘enemy of the people’, and he wanted to protect himself by ‘merging with the proletarian mass’.69

  Aleksei Iurasovsky grew up in the communal apartment of the Khaneyevsky family in Moscow in the 1950s and early 1960s. His mother was the daughter of the military doctor Aleksei Khaneyevsky, who had been given noble status in the First World War, and his father the descendant of a noble Russian-Georgian clan. Aleksei’s paternal grandfather and several great-uncles had fought in the White Army in the Civil War. Because his parents and grandmother were extremely wary of their proletarian neighbours, Aleksei learned to hold his tongue and mistrust everyone. ‘I was taught to fear the regime,’ he recalls.

  My grandmother added a lot of irrationality to the issue, because her warnings were rather fantastic, though convincing to a child. For example, she told me the story of a boy who put one foot on the front steps of the Finnish Embassy and was immediately arrested – never to be seen again. This story really frightened me. She had a lot of fairy-tales like that.

  Fear made Aleksei exceedingly cautious. As a student at Moscow University, he lived an isolated existence; his only trusted contact with the outside world was through a short-wave radio he had built as a schoolboy to listen to the BBC. Having shunned the Komsomol and all involvement in student politics, which he found repugnant, Aleksei concluded that his most sensible strategy was to avoid friends, who might become suspicious about his political loyalties. He maintained that strategy throughout his twenties and thirties, as he trained to become an archaeologist and Arabist. Looking back on his career, Aleksei reflects that his choices were determined by a ‘desire to escape’ from the political pressures of the Soviet system, which he perceived as a ‘minefield’ of rules and dangers that were always changing unpredictably. The fear he had felt as a child gradually dissolved – to be replaced, in his own words, by ‘gloominess and scepticism’ about Russia and the Soviet regime. His caution also played a role in his choice of a wife; Anna was his third cousin, and her immediate relatives had been repressed by the Stalinist regime. ‘It helped of course that we had come from the same background,’ Aleksei recalls. ‘It drew us closer together and gave our relationship a special understanding and solidarity.’70

  The inheritance of fear had a direct impact on many marriages. It was not uncommon for a woman whose own parents had been arrested, for example, to marry someone like a Party official, who she believed would protect her. Vera Minusova, whose father was arrested and then shot in 1937, married the local Party boss, a man nearly twice her age, even though she found him physically repugnant, because she felt, as her mother had advised her, that he would provide for her materially and enable her to bring up her children without fear for their future. ‘I cried when I got married,’ she recalls, ‘but Mother kept on saying, “Marry him! Marry him!” I did not love him, he was repulsive, but I had a daughter, she grew up, and I loved her.’ Marksena Karpitskaia, the teenage girl from Leningrad who lived on her own after the arrest and execution of both her parents in 1937, later married a senior military scientist and Party official in Leningrad. She told her husband everything about her family history, because she wanted to be sure that he knew what their marriage would involve. However, she insisted that they did not register their marriage, because, in her words: ‘Even after the rehabilitation of my parents, I wanted him to have the opportunity to walk away from me, if at any time he felt that it was too much for him to be married to the daughter of former enemies of the people.’71

  Many people with a spoilt biography told their future spouses about it only when they were about to marry. Like Marksena, they wanted them to know about their past before they joined their lives together, but to tell their spouses beforehand might have frightened them away. It took Lydia Babushkina nearly three years of courting before, on the eve of her wedding in 1965, she summoned up the courage to tell her fiancé (‘a convinced Stalinist f
rom a military family of convinced Stalinists’) about the arrest and execution of her father as an ‘enemy of the people’. Boris Kashin also waited until just before his wedding to tell his fiancée that his father had been shot as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ in 1938. ‘It was taking a huge risk,’ recalls Boris, ‘but I trusted her, and did not want to ruin her life by marrying her under false pretences. She reacted calmly and told me that her own grandfather had been repressed as a kulak, so she knew about such things.’72

  It is striking how many marriages were formed by couples who both came from repressed families. Something seemed to draw these people together. Larisa and Vitalii Garmash fell in love when they were first-year students at the Moscow Institute of Economics and Statistics in 1955. Larisa was the daughter of Zinaida Levina, who had spent eight years in the Kolyma camps (from which she returned in 1946 with a boy fathered, it would seem, by a prison guard) and then three years in the Potma camps, followed by exile in Kazakhstan. Larisa had lived with her mother in exile before going to Moscow. Vitalii had been arrested as a student in 1949 and had only just been rehabilitated when he met Larisa on the first day at the institute. As she recalls, their mutual attraction was linked to the sense, which they both had, that for the first time in their lives they could talk about their past to someone they could trust and who would understand. As Larisa remembers:

  He sat next to me in the lecture hall. I knew nothing about him, absolutely nothing, but we began to talk… Of course he talked with his Moscow friends, who knew about his arrest, and his closest friend had himself recently returned from the labour camps, but perhaps he did not feel the same emotional openness with them as with me, because, suddenly, his whole past came pouring out… Our relations developed very quickly after that. The fact that we had shared the same problems, that our family histories were not simple, that played an enormous role.73

  When Nikolai Meshalkin met his fiancée, Elfrida Gotman, in 1956, he did not tell her that his family had been driven out of Penza as ‘kulaks’ in 1933 and that they were still living in penal exile in the Komi region.* He knew nothing about Elfrida’s family – Soviet Germans from the Crimea who had also been deported to the Komi region in the war – but he sensed that they too had suffered from the Stalinist regime (the Komi region was full of Soviet Germans in exile), and this drew him to her. Nikolai bombarded her with love letters. For several years Elfrida was reluctant to open her heart to a Russian. ‘I thought that I would settle down with a nice German boy,’ recalls Elfrida. But Nikolai persisted, and Elfrida, who was nearly thirty and worried that she might not find a mate, at last agreed to marry him. Slowly, Nikolai and Elfrida began to tell each other about their families, and their common history and sympathy drew them tightly together. After nearly fifty years of marriage, Nikolai believes that this mutual understanding was the most important element in their relationship:

  I call this understanding solidarity. I have always had this feeling, this feeling of solidarity with this woman, because she also suffered, she was also repressed… I think that she’s had the same feeling about me. I think what we had together was not love but solidarity, which was more important for us both. Love goes away, but solidarity has nowhere else to go.74

  Nikolai and Elfrida Meshalkin with their daughters, Marina and Irina, Perm, 2003

  Nikolai and Elfrida did not tell their daughters about their spoilt biographies until 1992, after they had read about a new decree offering compensation to victims of repression. Before that they had been afraid to tell them the whole history, in case it burdened them or alienated them from the Soviet system. They always steered the conversations about the past to more positive episodes, such as the role which both their fathers played during the Great Patriotic War.75

  The Meshalkins were not unusual in this respect. Even in the last years of the Soviet regime, in the liberal climate of glasnost, the vast majority of ordinary Soviet families did not talk about their histories, or pass down stories of repression to their children. The influence of glasnost was confined largely to the major cities, and in the provinces, in towns like Perm where the Meshalkins lived, Stalin’s ghost was still alive. In the words of the poet Boris Slutsky, writing just before his death in 1986:

  The provinces, the periphery, the rear,

  Where it was too frozen for the thaw,

  Where to this day Stalin is alive.

  No he died! But his body is still warm.76

  Fifteen years after the collapse of the regime, there are still people in the provinces who are too afraid to talk about their past, even to their own children.77

  Antonina Golovina lived virtually her entire life with the secret of her spoilt biography. She only told her daughter about her ‘kulak’ background in the 1990s, more than sixty years after she was exiled to Siberia as a young girl. Antonina concealed the truth about her family’s history from her two husbands, each of whom she lived with for over twenty years. When she met her first husband, Georgii Znamensky, in 1947, in her final year as a medical student at the Leningrad Institute of Pediatrics, Antonina was already living with the assumed name of an old boyfriend to hide her past. Without a legal right of residence in Leningrad, she was frightened of the possibility of her rearrest and exile as an ‘anti-social element’ – a fate that befell many former ‘kulaks’ (including her own father) in the post-war years, when the regime was committed to a comprehensive purge of the cities – if it was discovered that she had concealed her ‘kulak’ origins when she was admitted to the institute. Antonina recalls her situation:

  All my documents were false. I was terrified of being stopped by a policeman on the street. My passport was full of stamps and signatures that had been forged, some of them by my sister in Sverdlovsk… My right of residence [in Leningrad] had expired more than six months earlier.

  Antonina was living in a communal apartment where the house elder was an ardent Stalinist, widely suspected as an informer, who made her suspicions of Antonina clear. On one occasion, when a neighbour showed off a new pair of shoes, Antonina had let her guard down by saying that her father would have made them better because he had been a shoemaker (a trade associated with the ‘kulaks’ in the countryside). Frightened that she would be exposed, it was a huge relief for Antonina when Georgii Znamensky asked her to marry him. Marriage to Znamensky, an engineer and native citizen of Leningrad, would give her a new name and a new set of documents to let her stay in Leningrad.

  For the next forty years Antonina kept the secret of her ‘kulak’ origins from Georgii. They rarely spoke to one another about their previous lives. When she talked about her family she was always careful to refer to them as poor peasants. She concealed the truth from all her friends and colleagues at the Institute of Physiology (she only came to realize much later that all her friends had come from repressed families). In 1961, she even became a member of the Party (which she would remain until 1991), not because she believed in its ideology (there were many occasions when she quietly subverted Party rules to help a friend) but because she thought that joining would divert suspicion from herself. She wanted to promote her medical career and gain some protection for her daughter, who was then fourteen and fast approaching the time when she would need to apply to university. ‘I was very worried about my daughter’s future,’ recalls Antonina.

  I did not want her ever to find out about my past. I wanted her to feel that she had a normal mother, just like the mother of every other girl at her [elite] school, where all the parents, or at least the fathers, were members of the Party.

  Antonina continued to conceal her spoilt biography from Georgii, even after he had divorced her in 1968, and she had married an Estonian called Boris Ioganson. In 1987, Antonina received a visit from an elderly aunt of Georgii who let slip that he was the son of a rear-admiral in the Imperial Navy, a man dedicated to the tsar, who had fought for the White Army in the Civil War. All this time, just like Antonina, she now realized, Georgii had concealed his origins. Having spent his ear
ly years in labour camps and ‘special settlements’, Georgii had decided to become an engineer in a conscious effort to forge a proletarian identity for himself. When he had applied for his first factory job he had made up the biographical details he entered on his questionnaire; throughout his life he kept a crib sheet with this invented biography close at hand in order to make sure that there were no discrepancies when he filled out another form. By some strange intuition, Georgii and Antonina had found in each other a mirror image of themselves.

  Boris Ioganson had also come from a repressed family – his father and grandfather were both arrested in 1937 – although Antonina did not discover that or tell him of her own spoilt biography until the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet system, when, emboldened by the public revelations and debates about the repressions of the Stalinist regime, they at last began to talk about their past. It was also at this time that Antonina and Georgii opened up their secret histories, which they had concealed from one another for over forty years. However, they agreed to keep this information from their daughter, Olga, who was then established in her own career as a schoolteacher. They thought that ignorance would protect her if the Stalinists returned. Gradually Antonina overcame her life-long fear and summoned up the courage to tell her daughter about her ‘kulak’ origins. Two things happened to bring about this change.