There are moments in time that seem characterized by blindness; or rather by darkness, like the inside of a sack in which people are thrown together, hardly distinguishable from one another, and yet all agitated by a sense of their own righteousness. The great animosity between the new Bolshevik government and the rural peasantry — reviled, strange, uncooperative; twitching and turning in its unwieldy and unchanging twilit world — could have ended differently. But the villages gave in first, and this was the beginning of the end for Russia’s rural communities.
Tax collection was undertaken by special detachments, whose arrival in the villages was feared like the Day of Judgment. These visitors dug up supplies that were being saved, turned over the houses, looked in underground stores, took the last of the provisions. Unused to this practice, communities at first tried to resist, everyone playing their part: sometimes firing warning shots from the rooftops, and sometimes unexpectedly killing someone. There were also attempts to steal from the collection points where precious grain was stored: the peasants went in groups with pikes and axes to demand their portion. Red Army soldiers were set loose on them like guard dogs let off the chain, and the crowds slowly dispersed.
There were not enough people who understood combat and military discipline and they needed people just like Nikolai, people who were warmed by the sun of the new regime, who saw it as the beginning of a new time of justice and were ready to die for it. Aged sixteen (not even old enough to order a drink now), he joined a special task unit. There are no documents or photographs in the family album to prove this, but they are hardly needed: the terrible scars on his stomach and back, traces of something that pierced him through, are proof enough.
The advantage of these special task units was that they were somewhat like volunteer militia groups, but together they made up a huge militarized organization (600,000 soldiers in 1922), well-armed, with weapons they kept with them at all times (hidden behind the stove, or under the bed). Three-quarters of them had no professional military training. They were flying squads, ready for action, and a living manifestation of the idea of the Soviet Union as one big military community, where every person could leap from his or her job at the lathe or the kitchen sink to fight for socialist justice. The units had their own uniform and motto, and they were sent to tackle flare-ups as if they were proper military units, but all the same they had a kind of tangential relationship with the Red Army itself, as if they were considered by the army to be so much dross and sawdust. You could join a special task unit from a young age: they recruited at sixteen, and you were handed your Mauser as soon as you enlisted.
At the margins of the country, where everything still hurt and smoke was still rising, the special task units fought in straight combat. In the central areas it was a different matter. Here the class enemy had learned to hide, to mask himself and pretend to be the old man fetching water at the well, or your mother’s brother, or even you yourself. The stories of what these units did, sometimes in their own villages and communities, flit like ghosts in the communal memory. My grandfather joined up in 1922, when the work of the units was coming to an end. In April 1924 the organization was officially closed. Nikolai had not turned eighteen. What he did in those two years, he never revealed. When he went to wash in the bathhouse his scars were visible, and he always said that he had been jabbed with a pitchfork when collecting taxes from the peasantry — and immediately changed the subject. What he had in his memory, I will never know. In the box marked “social background” on the ubiquitous form, he, the son and grandson of peasants, stubbornly wrote “factory worker.”
*
In childhood, when my father woke up in the morning he could see his own father in the blue and ever paler light, already awake, doing push-ups or lifting his dumbbells, or bent over the washbowl splashing water, or in front of the mirror, soaping his jaw. His boots shone like lamps, and his officer’s shirt was pressed, and he was so very tall and so very dear to my father.
Among the very ordinary faces of my relatives there is this one very handsome man, handsome in the way Marina Tsvetaeva defines as: “war heroic, seafaring, savage, most real and unbearable male beauty,” the sort that sends three villages wild with desire. There are no photos of Nikolai Stepanov as a child, and there probably never were; he must be about twenty in the earliest picture I’ve seen, and wearing a cap and tie. This is before the shaved head, his later impressive stature, the military uniform, but it’s clear he already belonged to that generation of Soviet dreamers with their fury-fueled desire to carry out anything the country demanded of them: to get on with the job of building the future’s garden cities — and then to get on with the job of strolling about in them. Their generation had disappeared by the end of the 1940s, but I still see them in photo portraits (some in caps and leather jackets, others in overcoats, but all cut from the same cloth, with the same weary expression on their faces, as if they’d seen too much). I see them, too, in later films made by the children of these men, who never tire of the subject of their fathers.
We choose to remember them as young men, birthed by the revolution, as if their youth, or their enthusiasm, gives us permission to think of everything that happened as a children’s game. Those they killed, and the ones who murdered them, will get to their feet again; stand up from the dusty roadside or the communal pit; they’ll push back the cement slab; run a hand through their hair and set off about their business again. Secretaries, representatives, commissars, policemen, army officers, they all walked with their heads held high, as if the renewed world had made them a promise. Every man’s job was a fine job and even the long-held contempt for the police went away briefly. In my family archive there are a few pictures of librarians in Tver posing in front of the camera with their crushes: drivers from a convoy, a detachment guarding prisoners. These young girls are so very serious, they are kneeling on one knee and holding rifles, pressing them against their chests and pointing them into the white light, taking aim. One of them is my grandmother Dora, who had just arrived in this big town to study.
Dora’s parents, Zalman and Sofya Akselrod, were from a village near Nevel in the North West. All I know about Zalman is that he made soap, and delicious ice cream, and his ice cream was in great demand in another town called Rzhev. They had six children who all lived happily together and were all members of the local Communist youth movement. Their father, who was a religious Jew, and was not a man to welcome in the new, used to lock all the doors at eight o’clock, so the young ones couldn’t leave the house, and then he would go to bed. The children would wait for an hour or so at the attic window, then one by one, they would drop down a ladder and run to the Komsomol meeting. At one such meeting they were told that the country urgently needed librarians, so Dora set off to Tver to train as a librarian.
The story goes that a local school needed a book fund, and Dora was sent to see the newly appointed head teacher. He wasn’t in the staff room so she went to the empty history classroom and stopped at the door. Dora was a little woman and at her eye level all she could see was a pair of gleaming high boots — a tall man was standing on a desk and screwing in a light bulb. This is how my grandparents met and they were never ever to be parted. He was teaching history (after his four years of education in a village school, and two years in a party school) and political knowledge, until he left to join the Red Army.
You might think he’d have found his fulfillment in the Red Army; that, deep at the heart of the embodiment of “people’s power,” his life would be given meaning and purpose. But even here there was no sense of connection; it was as if the proletarian Nikolai, with his tragic longing for order, was once again on the margins, not needed by his country, never quite fitting in. He read constantly, he had a wife and a young daughter, he was an officer in a Far Eastern garrison, but none of this could quite disperse the somber clouds; the Stepanovs lived among other garrison families, but were not of them. The War Commissar rarely bothered to
drop in.
It bears repeating what a handsome man he was. Upright, never a word in the wrong place, with careful movements and terse, measured speech, and a dimpled chin. He had a chivalrousness, inculcated by reading Walter Scott, which had no practical application in a garrison town with ten thousand newly imported inhabitants. Time passed peacefully enough for the first while, when the only changes were in the various libraries that fell under Dora’s management. Then, in the seventh year, misfortune befell them.
In our family there has always been a tendency to link the terrifying tectonic shifts of the external world to smaller human-size explanations, and so it was always said that grandfather’s eldest sister Nadya was to blame for everything. By this time, Nadya had already worked for the representative of the young Soviet Republic in Berlin, and she sent back from there a brand-new bike for her brother. Now she was climbing the greasy pole of the party, in charge of a whole swathe of land in the Urals, or perhaps Siberia. From this posting she sent her brother the dangerous present of a service pistol, and for some reason my grandfather accepted it. One of the accusations leveled against him in 1938 was that he had owned an illegal weapon. His daughter, my aunt Galya, remembered the last happy summer, walking across a huge field of rye to fetch the newspapers, and one of her father’s comrades insistently asking her, a tiny girl, whether her father possessed the tenth volume of Lenin’s writings.
In 1938, in what was later known as the Great Terror, the country’s punitive capacity was strained to the utmost: the Gulag could no longer cope with the quantity of prisoners. Production, so to speak, ground to a halt. Annihilation was the solution and army officers found themselves at the front of this grim line: hundreds and thousands of foreign spies were suddenly found among their ranks. So when people suddenly stopped talking to Nikolai, and his colleagues began looking at him as if from the far bank of a wide river, and then at a party meeting someone openly called him an enemy of the people, he went home and told Dora to pack her bags and go back to her parents. Dora refused: if they were going to die, they would die together.
He was never arrested, although he did have to hand in all his weapons nearly straight away. It was as if they were waiting for an order that was never given. All the same, in the small garrison town where everyone knew everyone else, the Stepanov family was very visible; if they went to the only shop people kept their distance, as if they were infectious. My grandfather was quite certain he had nothing to be ashamed of, and he began mentally preparing for interrogation. His preparations were suddenly cut short: he was told that an investigation had shown him to be innocent, and he was doing important work. He should wait for further orders. These orders arrived at the end of October and the Stepanovs were transferred to Sverdlovsk in the Urals. It was all completely mystifying.
The “unspoken” Beria amnesty lasted for a short time, during which a few of those who had been accused of crimes were pardoned, and some who were already in the camps were released and sent home. It confounded all logic and people sought out their own reasoning, if only for their private family stories. Our family was accustomed to believe that the mysterious Nadya had saved her brother by sending judicious word from her eastern realm. This was her very last gift before all contact lapsed. This version of events is not inherently less likely than any other, but given the unexpected shifts in policy, it feels more embroidered than the probable truth: two thirds and more of those who were under investigation on January 1, 1939, were freed, cases were closed and defendants, against all odds, were found not guilty. The amnesty didn’t last very long, but it gave Nikolai Stepanov his chance: this “reassessment” of political cases began with army officers.
The house in Sverdlovsk amazed them; they weren’t used to such big city glamour. It had a granite-faced plinth, the entrance to the building was tucked away in a yard, and the apartment had two rooms, a large kitchen, and a bright blue bathroom. Their transfer to Sverdlovsk was long awaited and a huge relief. My father was born there in August 1939: a child born to those who had survived.
*
Once a week Nikolai would take a walk around the bookshops to check whether anything new had appeared. Soviet distribution was organized in such a way that going to a bookshop was an adventure, with all the pleasure of the hunt: every shop had a different selection, and some were notably better than others — there were books that only very rarely appeared, but the hope of a find, and the occasional successes, kept the hunt alive.
My grandfather collected a huge library over his lifetime, and there was never any doubt that he had read it all: it was clear from the pencil markings. He would make notes and even corrections, underlining in blue where he didn’t agree with the author and in red where author and reader were of the same opinion. All the books on his shelves were covered with these red and blue lines. In special instances he took on the heroic task of transcribing a book, a task that seemed slightly ridiculous even then, and now that the internet has made any text accessible, it seems utterly mad. I think he was probably one of the last people in the world to copy books out by hand.
I have a few hand-sewn notebooks, in which my grandfather, in his calligraphic script, embellished by illuminated initial letters, wrote out one of the volumes of Klyuchevsky’s nineteenth-century Histories, chapter by chapter. Why this book? It wasn’t easy to get hold of, especially given Grandfather’s principled refusal to buy on the black market. But then there were many books like that at the time, and the choice of this one is enigmatic. Someone lent him the rare copy and for long months he copied it out, returning Russian history to its original manuscript state. I don’t know if he ever returned to his work as a reader, but this secretive and unfulfilled passion for everything to do with books and art did not begin with Klyuchevsky, nor end with him.
There’s a small brown notebook, made at some point after the war, which fits nicely in the hand; a page from a calendar inserted between the leaves: December 18, 1946, sunrise at 8:56, sunset at 15:57. It was around then that my grandfather began writing in the notebook. Everything about it, from the best handwriting to the colored inks he used to write his name on the endpapers, indicated that this was no working instrument for the quick noting of thoughts and trivia. This was a book, a selection, intended to be read time and time again.
The selection of quotes is eclectic to the point of eccentricity. Alongside the classics, from Voltaire and Goethe to Chekhov and Tolstoy, are folk sayings and “Oriental” anecdotes. The Marxist classics are there of course, the ones every Communist needed to study, Marx and Engels — but no Lenin, for some reason. To make up for Lenin’s absence there is a full set of Soviet writers from the time: Erenburg, Gorky, and the German writer Erich Maria Remarque with his lessons in brave solidarity. There’s a speech by Kirov, who was murdered ten years before, and the obligatory Stalin (“without the ability to overcome . . . one’s self-love and bow down to the will of the collective — without these qualities — there can be no collective”).
The whole book is an exercise in autodidacticism. The man who put it together and then diligently kept adding to it saw himself as a clever but lazy dog who needed leading, training, pushing toward activity. Life for him, and for his favored authors, is simply an exercise in continual self-improvement: endless heroism, valiant deeds and sacrifices in the white-hot air, with eventual immolation as a natural requisite — for you, my son, are Soviet man! But none of this was ever demanded of him: in the offices of army bureaucracy and the garrison towns and the little schools and remote libraries, life was humdrum and basic, it was bare existence, waiting for payments, standing in lines. The world was immutable, as if the efforts of Communists were superfluous: the party schools and the factories, with their clear and unchanging rules just didn’t seem to want to make that leap forward.
My grandfather was desperately and carefully preparing himself for the grand finale, and so he fell through time, as if it were a hole in a coat pocket, too
big not to catch on the lining, too perceptive not to know himself lost. The brown notebook contained lots of quotes about undying service and higher callings, but it also contained words of loneliness and the unrelieved desire for warmth. Toward the end I found this note: “Never rail against fate. A person’s fate is like that person himself. If the person is bad, then his fate is bad, too. Mongolian folk saying.”
*
Galya was reminiscing, and I sat by the telephone making notes on little squares of paper: how her father used to sing to her as he put her to bed when they were in the Soviet Far East. He sang Neapolitan songs, one very beautiful song about a fisherman and a girl wearing a gray skirt. I also remembered Grandfather’s songs, but by then his repertoire was different, more grief-stricken, often his voice was on the edge of breaking up entirely. He sang the ballad of a young suicide by the poet Nekrasov: “grievous grief, that wanders the wide world, suddenly came upon us.”
Galya told me the story of my one-year-old father walking around the Christmas tree, which was covered in sweets and gingerbreads, and taking a bite out of everything he could reach. This was in Sverdlovsk, a year before the war; my father’s own first memories were from the same period. He remembers a stuffed shaggy moose being dragged to the very top of a wide staircase in the Officers’ Residence where they lived, and him being lifted up onto its wide woolly back. The announcement of war came during a Sunday excursion in May. The whole military unit had gone on the outing, the officers’ wives were in their best dresses, the children carried baskets of food. They had traveled for an hour or two to the picnic spot, and had already begun laying out picnic cloths on the grass and paddling in the river when the messenger arrived: “All officers report to base immediately, and families to follow on.” The men left straightaway, and the rest is history.
In Memory of Memory Page 40
