The Whisperers Read online

  Anatoly’s mother, the domineering Lydia Ivanovna, who took her values from the old nobility, thought that Liuba had ‘bourgeois pretensions’. She ridiculed her ‘vulgar tastes’ in clothes and furniture because they reflected the ‘material acquisitiveness of the new Soviet elite’. She thought her son had married beneath him and once even said in a heated argument that Oksana was ‘the biggest mistake of the Revolution’, because she was the child of their mismarriage. Convinced that Liuba left her son for Babitsky because he could better satisfy her expensive tastes, Lydia tried to persuade Anatoly, who was distraught by Liuba’s departure, that he might lure her back with a more spacious apartment. But Anatoly would not compromise his principles. Looking back on these events in her memoirs, Oksana reflected on the three conflicting views on property that agitated her family: those of the nobility; the Spartan attitudes of the revolutionary Bolsheviks; and the materialistic attitudes of the new Soviet elite. Oksana sympathized with her mother’s position. She felt that her attachment to her country home was not so much a desire for property as a yearning for the sort of family life she had known as a child:

  Mama always used to say that we were going to ‘our dacha’ – as if it belonged to us. I remember this because Papa often said that he was opposed to the idea of things belonging to anyone. At that age, I had no idea about property and did not think about my mother’s aspirations to have something of her own. Today, as I try to understand her better, I think that it was not just about property. Mama was not simply building a dacha – she was building a family. She made her family out of real things, just as her peasant ancestors had done for centuries. She loved Boris, she loved me and she loved Volik, and that love was the focus of her home.35

  Volik Babitsky and Liuba and Oksana at the Kratovo dacha, 1935

  2

  Few people enjoyed the lifestyle of Liuba Golovnia. For most of the Soviet population the 1930s were years of material shortage, and even for the new bureaucracy, with access to special shops, the supply of goods was hardly plentiful. According to one estimate, during the first half of the 1930s the number of families receiving special provisions (a good estimate of the Soviet nomenklatura) was 55,500, of which 45,000 lived in Moscow. The goods they received allowed these families to live in greater comfort than the vast majority, but by Western standards they still lived very modestly. Here is a list of the goods received by the families of government workers in the centre of Moscow for one month in 1932:

  4 kg of meat

  4 kg of sausage

  1.5 kg of butter

  2 litres of oil

  6 kg of fresh fish

  2 kg of herring

  3 kg of sugar

  3 kg of flour

  3 kg of grains

  8 cans of food

  20 eggs

  2 kg of cheese

  1 kg of black caviar

  50 g of tea

  1,200 cigarettes

  2 pieces of soap

  These families could also purchase clothes and shoes from special shops with coupons given to them by the government, and they had first access to any luxury foods or consumer goods when they became available. But their privileged position was relatively marginal, and the majority of Stalin’s ordinary functionaries lived a modest existence, with no more than a few extra clothes or a slightly larger living space than the average citizen. As Mankov noted with sarcasm in his diary: ‘The most that anyone can dream to own: two or three different sets of clothes, one of which is imported, an imported bicycle (or motorcycle) and an unlimited opportunity to buy grapes at 11 rbs a kilogram (when they are on sale).’36

  There was a direct correlation between the allocation of material goods and power or position in the socio-political hierarchy. Below the Soviet elite nobody had many possessions – most people lived in a single pair of clothes – and there was barely enough food for everyone. But in the distribution of even these few goods there was a strict ranking system with infinite gradations between the various categories of employee based on status in the workplace, skill level and experience, and to some extent on geographical location, for rates of pay were better in Moscow and other major cities than they were in the provincial towns and rural areas. Despite its egalitarian image and ideals, this was in fact a highly stratified society. There was a rigid hierarchy of poverty.

  Private trade partly compensated for the frequent shortages of the planned economy. People sold and exchanged their household goods at flea markets. If they could afford it, they could buy the produce grown by kolkhoz peasants on their garden allotments and sold at the few remaining urban markets tolerated by the government. People were allowed to sell their furniture and other precious items at the state commission stores, or exchange their jewellery and foreign currency for luxury foodstuffs and consumer goods at the Torgsin shops developed by the regime in the early 1930s to draw out the savings of the population and raise capital for the Five Year Plan. The black market flourished on the margins of the planned economy. Goods unavailable in the state stores were sold at higher prices under the counter, or siphoned off to private traders (bribe-paying friends of the manager) for resale on the black market. To cope with the problems of supply an ‘economy of favours’ came into operation through small informal networks of patrons and clients (a system known as ‘blat’). In many ways the Soviet economy could not have functioned without these private connections. To get anything (a rented room, household goods, a railway ticket, a passport or official papers) required personal contacts – family and kin, colleagues, friends, or friends of friends. The same black-market principles were known to operate in Soviet factories and institutions, where many goods and services were supplied and exchanged on the basis of personal contacts and favours. Soviet propaganda portrayed blat as a form of corruption (the aim of rooting out these private networks of patron–client relations assumed an important role in the purges), and this view was shared by many workers, in particular. But most people were ambivalent in their attitude to blat: they recognized that it was not right morally, and certainly not legal, but relied on it, as everybody did, to fulfil their needs and get around a system they knew to be unfair. Without blat it was impossible to live with any comfort in the Soviet Union. As the proverb said: ‘One must have, not a hundred roubles, but a hundred friends.’37

  Housing shortages were so acute in the overcrowded towns that people would do almost anything to increase their living space. The mass influx of peasants into industry had put enormous pressure on the housing stock in the cities. In Moscow the average person had just 5.5 square metres of living space in 1930, falling to just over 4 square metres in 1940. In the new industrial towns, where house-building lagged far behind the growth of the population, the situation was even worse.38 In Magnitogorsk, for example, the average living space for working-class families was just 3.2 square metres per capita in 1935. Most of the workers lived in factory barracks, where families were broken up, or in dormitories, where a curtain around their plank-beds provided the only privacy. One female worker in Magnitogorsk drew a vivid picture of life in her barracks:

  Dormitories without separate rooms, divided into four sections, tiny kitchen areas where it was impossible to turn around, stoves thoroughly overrun with pots and pans, people in greasy work clothes (there were no showers at the steel plant), children in the hallways, queuing for water, wretched ‘furniture’ – metal cots, bedside tables, home-made desks and shelves.

  Many barracks were deliberately built without kitchens or washrooms in order to force their inhabitants to use the public dining halls, public baths and laundries. But most of the workers in Magnitogorsk proved resistant to this collectivization of their private life and preferred to live in dug-outs in the ground (zemlianki), where, despite the primitive conditions, there was at least a modicum of privacy. In 1935, about a quarter of the population of Magnitogorsk lived in these dug-outs. There were entire shanty towns of zemlianki on wasteland near the factories and mines. Workers demonstrated fierce
resistance to the Soviet’s attempts to wipe out this last zone of private property.39

  In Stalin’s Russia human relations revolved around the struggle over living space. According to Nadezhda Mandelshtam:

  Future generations will never understand what ‘living space’ means to us. Innumerable crimes have been committed for its sake, and people are so tied to it that to leave it would never occur to them. Who could ever leave this wonderful, precious twelve and a half square metres of living space? No one would be so mad, and it is passed on to one’s descendants like a family castle, a villa or an estate. Husbands and wives who loathe the sight of each other, mothers-in-law and sons-in-law, grown sons and daughters, former domestic servants who have managed to hang onto a cubby hole next to the kitchen – all are wedded forever to their living space and would never part with it. In marriage and divorce the first thing that arises is the question of living space. I have heard men described as perfect gentlemen for throwing over their wives but leaving them the living space.40

  There are endless tales of bogus marriages to obtain a place to live, of divorced couples sharing rooms together rather than give up their living space, of neighbours denouncing one another in the hope of getting extra space.41

  In 1932, Nadezhda Skachkova, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a peasant widow in Tver province, was studying at the Railway Institute in Leningrad. She was living in a student hostel, sharing one small room with several other girls. Like many recent arrivals from the countryside, Nadezhda was not registered to live in Leningrad. With the introduction of the passport system, she stood to be evicted from her room. Through acquaintances Nadezhda got in contact with a young Ukrainian soldier who had a room (8 square metres) in a communal apartment. The soldier was about to join his unit in the Donbass. Nadezhda paid him 500 roubles to marry her, money which her mother raised by selling her last cow and household property, and then moved into his room, where she was joined by her mother. Nadezhda met her husband only once:

  We went to see him the evening before he left for the army. We settled the payment. Then we went to the registry office to marry and after that to the house administration so that they could register us [Nadezhda and her mother] as residents. And that was that. The people in the house administration smiled, of course – they knew that we were getting round the rules. They checked that all the details were correct. My husband left the next morning. And Mama and I had eight square metres to ourselves… Of course I never thought to live with him. He was a simple country lad, barely literate. He sent us one or two letters – ‘How are you?’ and that sort of thing. He wrote not ‘Donbass’ but ‘Dobas’. Good Lord! Even that he could not spell.42

  The most common type of living space in the Soviet cities was the communal apartment (kommunalka), in which several families co-inhabited a single apartment, sharing a kitchen, a toilet and a bathroom, if they were lucky (many urban residents relied on public baths and laundries).43 In Moscow and Leningrad three-quarters of the population lived in communal apartments in the middle of the 1930s, and that way of living remained the norm for most people in those cities throughout the Stalin period.44 Along with everything else, the kommunalka, too, changed in nature in the 1930s. Whereas its purpose in the 1920s was to address the housing crisis and at the same time strike a blow against private life, it now became primarily a means of extending the state’s powers of surveillance into the private spaces of the family home. After 1928, the Soviets increasingly tightened their control of the ‘condensation’ policy, deliberately moving Party activists and loyal workers into the homes of the former bourgeoisie so that they could keep an eye on them.45

  The Khaneyevskys experienced every phase of kommunalka living. Aleksei Khaneyevsky came from a wealthy clan of merchants in Voronezh. He arrived in Moscow to study medicine in 1901. Aleksei became a military doctor, serving with distinction in the First World War, when he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, a rank that gave him the status of a nobleman. In 1915, Aleksei rented a comfortable and spacious apartment on Prechistenka Street near the centre of Moscow. He lived there with his wife, Nadezhda, their two young daughters, Irina (born in 1917) and Elena (1921), together with a nanny, until 1926, when the Moscow Soviet imposed its ‘condensation’ policy on the family. A factory worker, Marfa Filina, moved into a room in the apartment, followed by the family of a tailor, Vasily Kariakin, and then the family of Nikolai Sazonov, a Red Army veteran of proletarian origins who had risen to become a professor at the Communist Academy. Where three adults and two children had been living in the 1920s, there were fourteen people cramped in the apartment by 1936, when Nikolai Sazonov’s second wife moved into the flat with her mother. They shared the hallway, the kitchen (where two houseworkers slept), a toilet and a bathroom, which had no water (it was used as a store) so the only place to wash was at the cold-water tap in the kitchen. The Khaneyevskys attempted to isolate themselves from their new neighbours by putting up a door to close off the back of the apartment, where they lived. Their neighbours liked the door because it added to their privacy as well. In 1931, the district Soviet ordered that a bathroom be installed – it was part of the Soviet campaign for personal hygiene at that time – so the door was taken down. But life without the door proved very difficult, with constant arguments between the Khaneyevskys and the Sazonovs, so Aleksei paid a bribe to the Soviet to let them take away the bath. The bathroom was again turned into a store and the private door returned. The Khaneyevskys’ relations with the Sazonovs remained problematic, however. Nikolai’s mother-in-law was mentally unstable and often threw a fit in the corridor, accusing somebody of stealing food, which she hid beneath her bed. Class differences played a part in these conflicts. Nadezhda worried that the Sazonovs would steal her silver. She took offence when they appeared semi-naked in the corridor. She said they smelled and told them they should wash more frequently.46

  The Khaneyevsky household (communal apartment), Prechistenka (Kropotkin) Street, 33/19, Flat 25

  Many of the old apartment owners felt that they were picked on by the new inhabitants because they were seen by them as members of the ‘bourgeoisie’. Vera Orlova, a countess before 1917, lived in a communal apartment that had once been a part of her family’s house. She and her husband moved into a single room with their daughter, who describes the poisonous atmosphere in the apartment during the 1930s.

  Communal life was terrifying. The inhabitants measured every square centimetre of the corridor and every patch of common space and protested because mother left some valuable pieces of furniture there. They claimed they took up too much space, that she had to keep them in her room, that the corridor did not belong to her. The ‘neighbours’ timed how long we spent in the bathroom. In some communal apartments the inhabitants installed timers [on the lights] in the toilet, so that no one consumed more than their fair share of electricity.47

  The Khaneyevsky household was not overcrowded by comparison with the majority of communal apartments in Moscow and Leningrad. Yevgeny Mamlin grew up in a kommunalka with sixteen families (fifty-four people), each one living in a single room, and all sharing one kitchen. There were two toilets, and two basins with cold water, but no bathroom.48 Minora Novikova grew up in a communal apartment in Moscow. There were thirty-six rooms – each with at least one family – on a corridor that ran round three sides of the house. In her room there were ten people living in a space of only 12.5 square metres. ‘How we slept is hard to say,’ recalls Minora.

  There was a table in the room, on which my grandmother slept. My brother, who was six, slept in a cot underneath the table. My parents slept in the bed by the door. My other grandmother slept on the divan. My aunt slept on a large feather mattress on the floor with her cousin on one side, while my sister (who was then aged sixteen), my cousin (ten), and I (eleven) somehow squeezed in between them – I don’t remember how. We children loved sleeping on the floor: we could slide our bodies underneath our parents’ bed and have a lot of fun. I don’t imagine
that it was much fun for the adults.49

  Nina Paramonova lived in a similar ‘corridor system’ in Leningrad. The apartment occupied the whole floor of a house that had been requisitioned from a German baron by the Institute of Trade in 1925, and Nina moved there in 1931 with her husband, a ship designer, when she took a job as an accountant in the Leningrad railway administration. The apartment had seventeen rooms, with at least one family in each. Altogether there were over sixty people, who all shared a kitchen, a toilet and a shower room (with cold water).50

  At the other end of the social spectrum, the Third House of Soviets, a communal apartment for government workers in the centre of Moscow, also had a ‘corridor system’. The brother of Stalin’s wife, Fyodor Alliluev, lived with his mother in a room on the second floor. Ninel Reifshneider, the daughter of a veteran Bolshevik and political writer, lived with her parents, her grandparents, her brother and her sister in one of the nine rooms on the floor below, a living space of 38 square metres for six people, not counting her father, who usually slept in the Metropol Hotel, where he also kept a room. There were thirty-seven people living in the nine rooms of the corridor. They shared a large kitchen, where there was a shower and a bath behind a screen on one