Personal tragedies under Stalin

total-ness of Stalinist totalitarianism. Chris Berg reviews Resistance and dissent was not a The Whisperers: viable option for individuals living in Private Life in Stalin’s the early Soviet Union. Almost every- body faced the stark choice between ar- Russia rest and collaboration. by Orlando Figes That choice, and the dual way of (Metropolitan Books, life it created—between the fear of ar- 2008, 740 pages) rest and mutual denunciation—is the source of The Whisperers’ title. t has taken historians in both There are two words for ‘whisper’ Russia and the West a long time in Russian. Shepchushchii means whis- to get their minds around Stalin- pering out of fear of being heard. As I many urban Russians lived in commu- ism. Anne Applebaum’s 2003 Gulag: A Resistance and History went a long way to shedding nal apartments—either buildings spe- some of the misconceptions about the dissent was not a cially designed for collective living, or Stalinist system of repression—most in large houses confiscated from their obviously on the left, where the history viable option for owners and subdivided into cramped of the gulag has been shamefully mini- living quarters—there was an ever-pres- mised. In The Whisperers: Private Life individuals living ent fear of being overheard saying criti- in Stalin’s Russia, Orlando Figes steps cal things about the Soviet regime. And into the lives of individuals and fami- in the early Soviet the word sheptun refers to whispering lies to expose the personal tragedies Union. Almost or informing to the authorities. In the which are hidden behind the statistics cramped communal apartment, which behind Stalinist repression. everybody faced often housed dozens of residents, it was The tragedy of the individual un- easy for petty grudges to escalate into der a dictatorship has been a common the stark choice letters to a local party chief. theme in the history of 20th century to- To tell his stories of private life talitarianism for more than fifty years. between arrest and under Stalin, Figes has amassed an im- But as Figes points out in his introduc- pressive amount of unpublished mem- tion, our understanding of the individ- collaboration. oirs and archival evidence. But the true ual in Stalin’s Russia has been shaped by star of The Whisperers is the enormous the outpouring of memoirs by émigrés This has been compounded by a amount of oral testimony he was able and intellectuals who have been eager historiographical fashion to focus on to accumulate—more than one thou- to represent their deep yearning for resistance to authority, however isolat- sand individuals who lived under Stalin liberty—and the resilience of individ- ed and atypical. Since the opening up were interviewed. ualism—under totalitarianism. Auto- of many Soviet archives post-1991, his- And it is all the more important biographies like Victor Kravchenko’s I torians treating the era have enthusias- because this is a generation rapidly dis- Chose Freedom contained many revela- tically depicted the Stalinist period as a appearing. Figes notes that almost six tions but were extremely atypical of the continuous duel between repressors and per cent of the total sample died before average Russian. Yet, for lack of better dissenters, seizing upon the examples the book was published. alternatives, during the Cold War the of defiance against Soviet rule or stub- In The Whisperers, the dominant West treated high-profile intellectuals bornly brave individuals. Certainly this unit is the family. Idealistic Bolshevik like Kravchenko or Solzhenitsyn as ‘the approach is an improvement on Cold activists envisioned the 1917 seizure authentic voice’ of repressed individu- War era historical investigation—when of power as a revolution in not just als under communism. the academic focus was on either Polit- economic and political terms, but as a buro politicking or the broad sociologi- revolution in family relations as well. As Chris Berg is the Editor of the cal studies of the Soviet ‘masses’—but Maxim Gorky wrote, ‘the new structure IPA Review. it has had the effect of understating the of political life demands from us a new www.ipa.org.au IPA Review | August 2009 49 structure of the soul’. While ideologists maintained Communal apartment, Moscow, 1930-64 that Soviet children were to be raised collectively, rather than in the now outdated family unit, the less appealing flip side of this was that it gave dedi- cated Bolshevik parents almost carte blanche to ig- nore their children. If it takes a village, then parents are almost redundant. One of the most striking illustrations of So- viet life is the Figes’ discussion of the communal living arrangements and how they were so central to the communist experience. Our modern image of the Soviet Union may be those lifeless identical and symmetrical apartment complexes rising up out of the Russia flats. But in the Stalinist pe- riod, Russian accommodation was forged out of the existing, prerevolutionary housing stock. In the mid-1930s, three-quarters of the population of Leningrad and Moscow were living commu- nally in former apartments—dozens of families squeezed into single dwellings, whole families liv- ing in single rooms. One typical arrangement described by Figes consisted of an apartment revamped to consist of thirty-six rooms, each housing an extended fam- ily in a space of 12.5 square metres. In one of those rooms, a former inhabitant related, 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 par- ents slept in the bed by the door. My other grandmother slept on the divan. My aunt slept on a feather mattress on the floor with her cousin on one side, while my sister (who was then aged sixteen), my cousin (ten), and Source: Orlando Figes, The Whisperers, p178 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 Work provided little relief. One factory manager, in a letter to the have a lot of fun. I don’t imagine that it was Soviet president, described the perverse outcome of the Soviet bureau- fun for the adults. cratic system: Kitchens, laundry facilities and bathrooms could The problem with Soviet power is the fact that it gives rise to the vilest be shared or allocated by individual families type of official—one that scrupulously carries out the general designs depending on the layout of the apartment but of the supreme authority... This official never tells the truth, because would always be utilised as more places to sleep. he doesn’t want to distress the leadership. He gloats about famine and These communal living arrangements were origi- pestilence in the district or ward controlled by his rival. He won’t lift a nally just to resolve a housing crisis created by finger to protect a neighbour... All I see around me is loathsome politi- the rapid industrialisation of the soviet economy cizing, dirty tricks and people being destroyed for slips of the tongue. (and the rural refugees created by collectivisation) There’s no end to the denunciations. You can’t spit without hitting but they quickly embedded themselves in the So- some revolting denouncer or liar. What have we come to? It’s impos- viet surveillance apparatus. sible to breathe. The less gifted a bastard, the meaner his slander. Of With 30 or more families living virtually on course, the purge of your party is none of my business, but I think that top of each other and with often paper-thin walls, as a result of it, decent elements still remaining will be cleaned out. denunciations—justified or not—could be easily The most harrowing sections of the book when Figes looks at what he borne out of petty domestic disputes. describes as ‘the great break’, when the semi-liberal period of the New

50 IPA Review | August 2009 www.ipa.org.au Meeting of the elected management committee of the “New Life” collective farm, 1935 Office of War Information. Overseas Picture Division. Washington Division.

Economic Plan gave way to Stalin- it had no reserves of grain ready to ac- The Whisperers is not a book of ist five year plans, collectivisation and count for the shortfall. macro-level statistics, but of intimate rapid coerced industrialisation. But whether famine was a weapon family and personal histories. And at The Whisperersreads at times like a of terror or just its consequence is surely that level, terror and collectivisation catalogue of family tragedy, as the vol- beside the point. If we cannot go so far were nearly indistinguishable from untary ideological family breakdown to describe this period as a genocidal thuggery and murder. One focus of common in the first few years of the ‘terror-famine’ as some historians have Figes’ narrative is the Golovin family Soviet Union, quickly gives way into done, we can still agree that genocide from Obukhovo, a small town about the now-familiar Stalinist pattern of did occur against the ‘kulak’ popula- 400 kilometers east of Leningrad. The arrest, imprisonment, release and rear- tion. It was a deliberate policy of geno- local Komsomol were little more than rest. cide which brought about the famines a dozen violent teenagers armed with While not for the most part an of the 1930s, even if the linkage be- pistols, and the Golovins, having been interpretative history, The Whisperers tween famine and genocide was not as branded as kulaks, were at their mercy. is not totally disengaged from con- deliberate as Conquest makes out. Ivan Golovin, visiting the family from temporary historiographical debates. Figes quotes one Komsomol activ- a neighbouring town, was shot in the Figes disputes Robert Conquest’s char- ist describing the kulaks as ‘bloodsuck- head when obviously drunk Komsomol acterisation of the famine of 1932-33 ers’ and ‘parasites’: ‘We were trained to activists started firing at the Golovin as a ‘deliberately inflicted... massacre see the Kulaks, not as human beings, house during dinner. In a later con- of men, women and children.’ As Figes but as vermin, lice, which had to be frontation on the family doorstep, the argues, while the policy of collectivi- destroyed’. Ten million kulaks were ex- Komsomol ring leader yelled at Niko- sation was undoubtedly the culprit of pelled from their home between 1929 lai Golovin, ‘I shall shoot you, just as rural Russian suffering in this period, and 1932. And this figure obscures the I murdered your brother, and no one the scale of the famine itself took the countless individual horrors which ac- shall punish me’. Nikolai escaped from Moscow government by surprise, and companied collectivisation. that heated exchange without being www.ipa.org.au IPA Review | August 2009 51 shot, but he was soon after denounced by the young activists, arrested, and sent to a White Sea Gulag. The farms of Obukhovo were collectivised a few weeks later. One important conclusion of The Whisperers is just how large the Second World War looms in the Russian mem- ory. As Figes writes, for all the excesses, hardships and moral atrocities of the Stalinist years, for a certain generation the war was the defining event of their lives. It was a time of comradeship, of shared responsibilities and suffer- ing, when ‘people became better human beings’ because they had to help and trust one another; a time when their lives had greater purpose and meaning because, it seemed to them, their individual contributions to the war cam- paign had made a difference to the destiny of the nation. These veterans recalled the war as a pe- Gulag prisoners at work, 1936 riod of great collective achieve- ment, when people like them- by telling the story of the revolution And that’s it! That’s Soviet power! selves made enormous sacrifices through a series of tightly examined They can take you away and put for victory… interconnected individual narratives. you in prison—for nothing. And But for the regime, the memory of the Both A People’s Tragedy and his cul- whether you’re an enemy or not, war years was a double edged sword— tural history of Russia, Natasha’s Dance you won’t persuade anybody of on the one hand, Figes writes, ‘the won Figes a truckload of awards, and your innocence. That’s how it is. commemoration of the Great Patriotic it is easy to understand why—Figes I get orders to guard prisoners. War served as a reminder of the success presents his often highly specific and Should I believe these orders or of the Soviet system’, but on the other interwoven material in a uniquely should I believe you? When you hand, the war was a period of de facto engaging fashion. While his earlier kill a pig you don’t feel sorry for de-Stalinisation, as the instruments of books are powerful and compelling, it when it squeals. And even if I repression took a secondary role com- The Whisperers is undoubtly his larg- did feel sorry for somebody, how pared to the war effort. est achievement. Bringing together so could I help them?... In the camp By the 1960s, Victory Day was a many personal narratives, Figes is able I guarded mothers with sick chil- tightly controlled state celebration of to illuminate aspects of life under the dren. They cried and cried. But the war effort, carefully integrated in Soviet regime which other historians, what could I do? They were being the government’s propaganda narra- relying on more scattered testimony punished for their husbands. But tive. But to a large extent the memory and the inherent biases of official ar- that was not my business. I had of the Soviet war effort defined the chives, have not. my work to do. attitude of many Russians towards In the final pages ofThe Whisperers, The tragedy of Stalinism was that these their Stalinist past. This attitude was Figes quotes a former prison guard who sorts of justifications were common. complemented by a tacit silence about through a mixture of half-baked ideol- We might describe it as ‘Stalin’s’ Rus- what Vladimir Putin has coyly de- ogy and hard-learnt realism justified his sia, but the totalitarianism of the early scribed as ‘some problematic pages’ of own position in the Stalinist system: Soviet Union came from below, as Russian history. What is Soviet power, I ask you? individuals were forced to slot them- Figes is one of the strongest his- It is an organ of coercion! Un- selves into the system: to whisper, or torians of the Soviet Union and the derstand? Say, for example, we be whispered about. Russian psyche. His book on the Rus- are sitting here and talking, and R sian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy an- two policemen knock at the ticipated his Whisperers methodology door: ‘Come with us!’ they say.

52 IPA Review | August 2009 www.ipa.org.au