The Whisperers Read online

  The children of ‘kulaks’, no less than those of bourgeois or noble families, felt the pressure to conceal their social origins. They were widely banned from Soviet schools and universities, from the Pioneers and the Komsomol, from the Red Army and from many jobs. Their fear of exclusion was frequently reflected in a desperate urge to prove themselves as ‘Soviet citizens’ by distancing themselves from their families. In 1942, Wolfgang Leonhard, the twenty-year-old son of a German Communist who had come to Moscow in 1935, was deported to the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. He studied at a teacher-training college, where most of the students were ‘kulak’ children, who had been exiled to this semi-desert region in the early 1930s. They had suffered terribly as young children but had since been allowed to go to school. They were now about to become teachers. As Leonhard notes, this brought about a complete change in their political identity:

  Most of my fellow-students used to go home at the weekends. That is to say, they used to go to one of the [special] settlements which lay in the inner or outer environs of Karaganda. When they came back, they often spoke indignantly about their parents. ‘They still don’t understand anything at all!’ I often heard them say. ‘I’ve tried so often to explain to them why collectivization is justified, but the old people just never will understand it!’

  These sons and daughters of the kulaks who had been exiled here as small children had in fact become Stalinists with the passage of time.100

  Many ‘kulak’ children ended up as ardent Stalinists (and even made careers for themselves by joining the repressive organs of the state). For some the transformation involved a long and conscious process of ‘working on themselves’ that was not without its psychic costs. Stepan Podlubny is an example. Born in 1914 to a peasant family in the Vinnitsa region of western Ukraine, Stepan and his mother fled to Moscow in 1929, after his father had been exiled as a ‘kulak’ to Arkhangelsk. Stepan found a job as an apprentice in the factory school of the Pravda printing plant. He joined the Komsomol, headed a brigade of shock workers, edited a wall-newspaper (a form of agitprop), became a member of the factory board, and at some point it seems he was recruited as an informer by the police. All this time he carefully concealed his ‘kulak’ origins. He kept a diary which charted his own struggle to purge the ‘sick psychology’ of his peasant ancestors and reconstruct himself as a Soviet citizen. He tried to read the correct books, to adopt all the correct attitudes, to cultivate himself by dressing neatly and learning how to dance, and to develop in himself the Soviet public virtues of activity and vigilance. He drew up a ‘balance sheet’ of his ‘cultural progress’ at the end of every year (just as the state’s own planning agencies drew up annual balances of economic progress in the Five Year Plan). His ‘kulak’ background was a constant source of self-loathing and self-doubt. He saw it as an explanation for his own shortcomings, and wondered whether he was capable of ever really becoming a fully equal member of society:

  13.9.1932: Several times already I have thought about my production work. Why can’t I cope with it painlessly? And in general, why is it so hard for me?… A thought that I can never seem to shake off, that saps my blood from me like sap from a birch tree – is the question of my psychology. Can it really be that I will be different from the others? This question makes my hair stand on end, and I break out in shivers. Right now, I am a person in the middle, not belonging to one side nor to the other, but who could easily slide to either.

  Podlubny was constantly afraid that his origins would be exposed, that he would be denounced at work (a ‘snake pit’ filled with ‘enemies’), leading to his sacking and possible arrest. Eventually his ‘kulak’ origins were indeed discovered by OGPU, which told him it would not take action, provided he ‘continued to do good work for them’. It seems likely that Podlubny began to inform on his work colleagues. In his diary he confessed to feeling trapped – he was repulsed by his public persona and he clearly longed to ‘be himself’.

  8.12.1932: My daily secretiveness, the secret of my inside – they don’t allow me to become a person with an independent character. I can’t come out openly or sharply, with any free thoughts. Instead I have to say only what everyone [else] says. I have to walk on an uneven surface, along the path of least resistance. This is very bad. Unwittingly I’m acquiring the character of a lickspittle, of a cunning dog: soft, cowardly, and always giving in.

  The news that a fellow student had not been punished after he had been exposed as the son of a ‘kulak’ was greeted by Podlubny as a ‘historical moment’, suggesting as it did that he no longer needed to feel so stigmatized by his social origins. He embraced this personal liberation with joy and gratitude towards the Soviet government.

  2.3.1935: The thought that I too can be a citizen of the common family of the USSR obliges me to respond with love to those who have done this. I am no longer among enemies, whom I fear all the time, at every moment, wherever I am. I no longer fear my environment. I am just like everybody else, free to be interested in various things, a master interested in his lands, not a hireling kowtowing to his master.

  Six months later, Podlubny was accepted as a student at Moscow’s Second Medical Institute. He had always dreamed of studying at a higher institute, but knew his ‘kulak’ origins would be a stumbling block. The fact that the Komsomol at the Pravda plant had supported his application was for him the final affirmation of his new Soviet identity.101

  For many ‘kulak’ children, the urge to be recognized as Soviet, to become a valued member of society, had less to do with politics or personal identity than with drive and industry.

  Antonina Golovina was a bright girl, full of energy and initiative, with a strong sense of individuality which she took from her father, Nikolai. At Shaltyr, she was the leader of the school brigade. She taught the other children how to read. On her way back to Pestovo, where she joined her father in 1934, the eleven-year-old girl made a firm resolution to ‘study hard and prove myself’.102 At her new school she was taunted and abused by the older boys as a ‘kulak daughter’ (there were many ‘kulak’ children in the school in Pestovo) and picked on by the teachers. One day, when the children were told off for misbehaving, Antonina was called up to the front of the class for a special reprimand by one of the senior teachers, who shouted that she and ‘her sort’ were ‘enemies of the people, wretched kulaks! You certainly deserved to be deported, I hope you’re all exterminated here!’ In her ‘Memoirs’ (2001) Antonina recalls the incident as the defining moment in her life. She felt a deep injustice and anger that made her want to shout back at the teacher in protest. Yet she was silenced by an even deeper fear about her ‘kulak’ origins.

  Suddenly, I had this feeling in my gut that we [kulaks] were different from the rest, that we were criminals, and that many things were not allowed for us. Basically, as I now understand, I had an inferiority complex, which possessed me as a kind of fear that the regime might do anything to us, because we were kulaks, that we had no rights, and we had to suffer in silence.

  After the incident with the teacher, a classmate called Maria, whose father had been arrested as a ‘kulak’, whispered to Antonina: ‘Listen, let’s write a letter of complaint about the old witch for calling us all these things!’ Antonina was afraid, so Maria wrote the letter for them both. She wrote that as children they were not to blame that their parents had been kulaks, and pleaded for the chance to prove themselves by studying hard. The two girls decorated the letter by drawing a New Year’s tree.* Antonina hid the letter in a bundle of laundry (her mother did the cleaning and washing for the school) and delivered it to the headmaster’s door. The headmaster sympathized with the two girls. He called them to his office and told them that ‘in secret he agreed with us, but that we were not to say a word to anyone’. Evidently, the teacher who had been so harsh to them was spoken to by him, because she later softened her approach. She even gave the girls parts to play in the school drama, which was all about the suffering of a peasant nanny (played by Antonina)
in the home of a ‘kulak’ (Maria). Antonina writes in her memoirs:

  At the end of my final monologue I had to say the words: ‘You have sucked the life from me, I now see, and I do not want to stay with you. I am leaving you to go to school!’ – and with these words I left the stage. There was thunderous applause. I had stepped into the role to such an extent that my indignation appeared genuine.103

  Antonina threw herself into her studies. She loved school and did very well, appearing several times in the list of outstanding students (otlichniki) displayed in the school hall. It meant that she was chosen to march in the school parades on Soviet holidays. Antonina loved these demonstrations – not because she was political (she thought it was demeaning to carry a banner) but because she was proud to represent her school. She yearned to join the Pioneers and was so heartbroken when she was excluded because of her ‘kulak’ origins that she wore a home-made version of their scarf and went to the club-house when they assembled in the desperate hope that they might include her in their games.104 Gradually, she made a place for herself. In 1939, she was admitted to the Komsomol, despite her ‘kulak’ past (possibly the Komsomol Committee had turned a blind eye to her past, because it valued her initiative and energy). Emboldened by this success, Antonina summoned up the courage to travel incognito to her native village – by then known as the ‘New Life’ kolkhoz – in the summer of 1939. There she discovered that her old home had been turned into an office for the kolkhoz.105

  The otlichniki (outstanding students) of Class B, Pestovo School, 1936. The thirteen-year-old Antonina (the only child without the uniform of the Pioneers) is standing on the left.

  As she grew in confidence and ambition, Antonina decided to stop trying to get accepted for who she was and simply make up a new identity. She began to lie about her origins whenever she was asked to fill out questionnaires. ‘I knew what I was doing,’ she recalls. ‘I had decided to write a new biography for myself.’ From the end of her teenage years, Antonina lived a secret life. She did not speak about her family to any of her friends. She did not tell her first serious boyfriend, whom she met in 1940, because she was afraid that he might leave her if he found out about her past. For the next fifty years, she hid her identity from her family, because she was afraid, for them and for herself. Looking back, she remembers:

  I had to be alert all the time, not to slip up and give myself away. When I spoke I had to think: did I forget something? Did I say anything that might make people suspicious? It was like that all the time… I was afraid, and I would remain silent. This fear lasted all my life. It never went away… Mama always said, ‘When you live with wolves, you must learn to live like wolves!’106

  3

  The Pursuit of Happiness

  (1932–6)

  1

  In 1932, Fania Laskina married Mikhail Voshchinsky, a Party worker and chief administrator of building works at the Vesnin Brothers’ architectural workshops, one of Moscow’s leading construction companies. Fania left the Laskin home on Zubov Square and, after a few months in rented rooms, moved with her husband to a three-room apartment in the fashionable Arbat area. It was a tiny apartment, just 58 square metres in total area, but in comparison with the living conditions of the vast majority of Muscovites it was modern and luxurious, with its own kitchen, its own bathroom and toilet, and even its own private telephone.1

  Fania Laskina and Mikhail Voshchinsky (wedding photograph) Moscow, 1932

  Moscow grew at a furious pace in the early 1930s. From 1928 to 1933 the population of the capital increased from 2 million to 3.4 million, mainly on account of the mass influx of peasants into industry. Their arrival put enormous pressure on the housing stock. After 1933, the growth of the city was controlled by the passport system and by mass expulsions of ‘alien elements’.2 To live in Moscow was the dream of millions. The city was the centre of power, wealth and progress in the Soviet Union. Propaganda portrayed it as living proof of the better life to come under socialism.

  The Laskin household in the Arbat: Sivtsev Vrazhek 14, apt. 59

  Stalin took a personal interest in the ‘socialist construction’ of his capital. In 1935, he signed an ambitious Master Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow. The Vesnin Brothers, Leonid, Viktor and Aleksandr, were among the architects responsible for drawing up the plan under the direction of the Moscow Soviet. The plan envisaged a city of 5 million inhabitants, with vast new residential suburbs connected by highways, ring roads, parklands, sewage systems, communication networks and a Metro system that would be the most advanced in the industrial world. Everything was planned on a monumental scale. The medieval city centre, with its narrow streets and churches, was largely cleared to make room for wider streets and squares. A vast new parade route was constructed through the centre of the capital. Tverskaia (renamed Gorky) Street was broadened to a width of 40 metres by knocking down the old buildings (many architectural monuments, including the eighteenth-century chambers of the Moscow Soviet, were reassembled further back from the main road). Red Square was cleared of its market stalls to allow for the march of the massed ranks past the Lenin Mausoleum, the sacred altar of the Revolution, on 1 May and Revolution Day. There were even plans to blow up St Basil’s Cathedral, so that the marchers could file past the Mausoleum in one unbroken line. Stalin’s Moscow was recast as an imperial capital, a Soviet St Petersburg. Bigger, taller, more advanced than any other city in the Soviet Union, it became a symbol of the future socialist society (Bukharin said that the Master Plan was ‘almost magical’ because it would turn Moscow into ‘a new Mecca, to which the fighters for mankind’s happiness would flock from all the ends of the earth’).3

  The Vesnin Brothers played a leading part in this transfiguration of the capital. Their work on it involved a dramatic change in their architectural philosophy. During the 1920s, the Vesnins had been in the vanguard of the Constructivist movement, which sought to incorporate the Modernist ideals of Le Corbusier in Soviet architecture. Their adoption of the neoclassical and monumental style, in which Stalin’s Moscow was to be rebuilt, represented an artistic and a moral compromise. But as architects they depended on patrons, and the only patron was the state. The brothers had been on the planning committee for the grandiose Palace of the Soviets, intended for the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, demolished in 1932. The Palace was supposed to be the tallest building in the world (at 416 metres it was to be 8 metres taller than the Empire State Building, which opened in New York in 1931) with a colossal statue of Lenin (three times the size of the Statue of Liberty) at its summit.4 The Palace was never built,* but for years the site was a monument to the promise of Moscow.

  The Vesnins also helped to oversee the construction of the Moscow Metro, another icon of Communist progress. The tunnelling began in 1932. By the spring of 1934, the enterprise employed 75,000 workers and engineers, many of them peasant immigrants and Gulag prisoners. The digging was extremely dangerous work. There were frequent fires and cave-ins, because of the softness of the soil, and more than a hundred people died during the construction of the first line, 12 kilometres of track between Sokolniki and Gorky Park. Gulag labour was employed in all the city’s major building projects during the 1930s (there were several labour camps in the vicinity of the capital). A quarter of a million prisoners took part in the construction of the Moscow–Volga Canal, which provided water for the growing population of the capital. Many of them died from exhaustion, their bodies buried in the foundations of the canal. Like Peter’s capital, St Petersburg, which was in many ways its inspiration, Stalin’s Moscow was a utopian civilization constructed on the bones of slaves.

  When the first Metro line was opened, in 1935, Lazar Kaganovich, the Moscow Party boss, hailed it as a palace of the proletariat: ‘When our worker takes the Metro, he should be cheerful and joyous. He should think of himself in a palace shining with the light of the advancing, all-victorious Socialism.’5 The Metro stations were built as palaces, with chandeliers, stained-glass panels, bra
ss and chrome fittings, walls of marble (there were twenty different kinds), porphyry, onyx and malachite. Maiakovsky Station (1938) matched the beauty of a church, with its oval ceiling cupolas, mosaic designs, marble patterned floors and stainless-steel arches, which created a bright and lofty atmosphere in the central hall. Drawing up their plans for the Stalin Factory (Avtozavod) Metro Station during the late 1930s, the Vesnins likened the effect they aimed to achieve to the atmosphere inside a cathedral. The finished station (1943), with its high, almost gothic marble columns, its simple use of space and light, and its white marble bas reliefs depicting the ‘achievements’ of the Five Year Plans (Magnitogorsk, the Stalin Factory, the Palace of the Soviets, the Moscow–Volga Canal), perfectly accomplished their ideal.6 The splendour of these proletarian palaces, which stood in such stark contrast to the cramped and squalid private spaces in which the majority of people lived, played an important moral role (not unlike the role played by the Church in earlier states). By inspiring civic pride and reverence, the beauty of the Metro helped to foster popular belief in the public goals and values of the Soviet order.