Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

1. The Last Day

I spoke Russian before I spoke English. Until I was sent to an English prep school, dressed up in a cap, blazer and shorts, I saw the world in Russian. If languages have a colour, Russian was the hot pink of my mother’s seventies dresses, the warm red of an old Uzbek teapot she had brought with her from Moscow, the kitschy black and gold of the painted Russian wooden spoons which hung on the wall in the kitchen. English, which I spoke with my father, was the muted green of his study carpet, the faded brown of his tweed jackets. Russian was an intimate language, a private code I would speak to my mother, warm and carnal and coarse, the language of the kitchen and the bedroom, and its smell was warm bed-fug and steaming mashed potatoes. English was the language of formality, adulthood, learning, reading Janet and John on my father’s lap, and its smell was Gauloises and coffee and the engine oil on his collection of model steam engines.

My mother would read me Pushkin stories like the extraordinary folk epic ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’. The supernatural world of dark Russian forests, of brooding evil and bright, shining heroes conjured on winter evenings in a small London drawing room and punctuated by the distant squeal of trains coming into Victoria station, was infinitely more vivid to my childhood self than anything my father could summon. ‘There is the Russian spirit, it smells of Russia there,’ wrote Pushkin, of a mysterious land by the sea where a great green oak stood; round the oak was twined a golden chain, and on the chain a black cat paced, and in its tangled branches a mermaid swam.

At the end of the scorching summer of 1976 my grandmother Martha came to visit us in London. I was four-and-a half years old, and the lawns of Eccleston Square garden were scorched yellow by a heatwave. It was a summer of baking pavements, the flavour of strawberry lollipops, a favourite pair of beige corduroy dungarees with a large yellow flower sewn on the leg. I remember my grandmother’s heaviness, her musty Russian smell, her soft, pudgy face. In photographs she looks uncomfortable, large and angry and masculine, holding me like a wriggling sack while my mother smiles nervously. She scared me with her brusque scolding, her unpredictability, a sensed tension. She would sit for hours, alone and silent in an armchair by the drawing room window. Sometimes she pushed me away when I tried to climb on her lap.

One afternoon we were in Eccleston Square, my mother chatting with other mothers, my grandmother sitting on a bench. I was playing cops and robbers with myself, wearing a plastic policeman’s helmet and touting a cowboy pistol, running around the garden. I crept up behind my grandmother, jumped out from behind the bench and tried to put a pair of toy handcuffs on her wrists. She sat there motionless as I struggled to close the handcuffs, and when I looked up she was crying. I ran to my mother, who came over and they sat together for a long time while I hid in the bushes. Then we went home, my grandmother still silently weeping.

‘Don’t be upset,’ my mother said. ‘Granny is crying because the handcuffs reminded her of when she was in prison. But it was a long time ago and it’s all right now.’

For most of her life my mother lived for an imaginary future. Her parents were taken away to prison when she was three. From that moment, she was raised by the Soviet state, which moulded her mind, if not her spirit, in its ways. A bright dawn was just over the horizon, her generation was told, but could only be attained, Aztec-like, by the spilling of blood and by the sacrifice of individual will to the greater good. ‘Simple Soviet people are everywhere performing miracles,’ is a phrase from a popular 1930s song my mother often cites, always with heavy irony, when she is confronted by an example of bureaucratic stupidity or crassness. But in a profound sense, the idea that the individual could overcome seemingly impossible obstacles shaped her life.

Her father Boris Bibikov believed the same. He inspired and terrified – thousands of men and women to raise a giant factory quite literally from the mud on which it stood. In her turn, my mother performed a scarcely less remarkable miracle. Armed with nothing but her unshakeable conviction, she took on the whole behemoth of the Soviet state, and won.

I never think of my mother as small, though she is in fact tiny, a shade under five feet tall. But she is a woman of gigantic character; the kinetic field of her presence fills large houses. I have often seen her crying, but never at a loss. Even at her weakest moments, she is never in doubt of herself. She has no time for navel-gazing, for the self-indulgent lives that my generation have led, though for all her iron self-discipline she possesses a vast fund of forgiveness for human failure in others. From my earliest childhood, my mother has insisted that everything in life must be fought for, that any failure is primarily a failure of will. All her life she imposed uncompromising demands on herself, and met them. ‘We must be worthy of their belief in us, we must fight,’ she wrote to my father. ‘We have no right to be weak… Life will crush us in a minute and no one will hear our cries.’

She is also ferociously witty and intelligent, though I usually only see this side of her when she is in company. At the dinner table with guests her voice is clear and emphatic, pronouncing her opinions with unfashionable certainty in roundly enunciated English.

‘Everything is relative,’ she will say archly. ‘One hair in a bowl of soup is too much, one hair on your head is not enough.’ Or she will declare: ‘Russian has so many reflexive verbs because Russians are pathologically irresponsible! In English you say, “I want”, “I need”. In Russian it’s “want has arisen”, “need has arisen”. Grammar reflects psychology! The psychology of an infantile society!’

When she speaks she slips effortlessly from Nureyev to Dostoyevsky to Karamzin and Blok, her snorts of derision and dismissive hand-waves interspersed with gasps of admiration and hands rapturously clapped to the chest as she swerves on to a new subject like a racing driver taking a corner. ‘Huh, Nabokov!’ she will say with pursed lips and a raised eyebrow, letting all present know that she finds him an incorrigible show-off and a cold, heartless and artificial individual. ‘Ah, Kharms,’ she says, raising a palm to the sky, signalling that here is a man with a true understanding of Russia’s absurdity, its pathos and everyday tragedy. Like many Russian intellectuals of her generation, she is utterly at home in the dense kasbah of her country’s literature, navigating its alleys like a native daughter. I have always admired my mother, but at these moments, when she holds a table in awe, I am intensely proud of her.

Milan Kundera wrote that ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ And so it is for my mother, in telling this story. She rarely spoke to me about her childhood when I was myself a child. But as an adult, when I asked, she began to speak about it freely, without melodrama. Now, she recalls her own life with striking dispassion and candour. But at the same time, she worries that when I tell the story it will be too grim, too depressing. ‘Write about the good people, not just about the darkness,’ my mother has said to me when describing her childhood. ‘There was so much human generosity, so many wonderful, soulful people.’

One final image of my mother, before we begin her story. Aged seventy-two, she is sitting at a lunch table spread with food and dappled with sunlight. We are at a friend’s house on an island near Istanbul, on a cool terrace overlooking the Sea of Marmara. My mother perches sideways on a dining chair, as she has always done because of her hip, crippled by tuberculosis in childhood. Our host, a Turkish writer, is tanned as golden brown as an ancient sea god. He pours wine, passes plates of mussels he has gathered himself and plates of food that his excellent cook has prepared.

My mother is relaxed, at her most charming. Among the guests is a Turkish ballet dancer, a tall, beautiful woman with a dancer’s rangy physicality. She and my mother are talking ballet with great passion. I am at the end of the table, talking to our host, when I hear the tone of my mother’s voice change; nothing dramatic, a modulation only. But the tiny shift cuts across the various conversations at the table and we turn to listen.

She is telling a story about Solikamsk, a wartime town of lost children to which she was evacuated in 1943. The teacher at the overcrowded school she attended would bring a tray of plain black bread at lunchtime with which to feed her class. She would tell the local children to leave their pieces for the orphans, though they were all close to starving.

My mother tells the story simply, with no great pathos. She looks at no one. On her face is what I can only describe as a smile of pain. With a small gesture of her two index fingers she shows us the size of the pieces of bread on the tray. Her eyes stream with tears. The dancer begins to cry too, and hugs my mother. I, though I have heard the story before, am struck by the ordinary miracle of human life and fate – that the hungry child in that wartime winter schoolroom is the very same person sitting among us on that hot afternoon, as though she has joined our carefree modern lives from another, distant world of war and hunger.

My aunt Lenina’s kitchen on Frunzenskaya Embankment, on a luminous Moscow summer evening in the late 1990s. I am sitting on my aunt’s wide window sill, smoking a cigarette after a gargantuan, greasy dinner which I have been forced to praise at least five times before she is satisfied that I am content. Lenina is boiling water in her old enamel kettle, disdaining the German electric kettle her daughters have given her.

Lenina, my mother’s sister, is as heavy-set as their mother Martha was, wide-hipped and large-breasted, her back bowed with the weight of the world’s troubles. She has Martha’s piercing blue eyes. So does my mother, so do I, so does my son Nikita. But in temperament Lenina seems to be more like her gregarious father, Boris Bibikov. She loves gathering friends around the kitchen table, chatting, gossiping, intriguing. She likes to pull strings and to organize other people’s lives by means of epic telephone conversations. She is highly skilled at terrorizing television presenters during phone-ins and shop managers in person. She is a big woman with a powerful voice, and suffers from many, many near-fatal illnesses which she loves to talk about.

As she pours the tea, Lenina launches into her favourite subject, her nephew’s variegated love life. Her eye gleams with a girlish prurience. I have seen through Lenina’s stern old lady act long before. That is just one weapon in the formidable arsenal she deploys in the daily drama of struggle, conflict and scandal with the outside world. What she really wants to do is sit forward on her stool at the corner of the table, put an elbow on the table, fix her nephew with a beady eye and hear the latest details. At the naughty bits she cackles like a fishwife.

‘You’re lucky I don’t tell your mother any of this,’ she chortles. Strangely, though she never tires of scolding her own daughters, she seldom criticizes me during our weekly gossip sessions. Instead, she chips in with worldly-wise and often rather cynical advice. My aunt Lenina is, despite the halfcentury’s difference in our ages, a true friend and confidante.

Lenina has a phenomenal memory for detail. Our conversations always start in the present, but that is transient and quickly dealt with, insufficiently colourful and dramatic to hold her attention for long. She drifts back into the past, quite seamlessly, from one sentence to the next, setting off on a nightly ramble through the paths of her memory, her attention pulled this way and that, like a glass on a Ouija board, by different stories and voices.

As she gets older, less mobile and blinder, her imagination seems to become clearer and clearer. The past is becoming more immediate to her than the present. At night the dead visit her, she complains. They won’t leave her alone – her husband, her parents, her friends, her granddaughter Masha, dead of cancer at twenty-six, all arguing, cajoling, laughing, nagging, getting on with the business of life as though they don’t realize that they’re dead. She sees the past in her dreams, incessantly. ‘It’s like a cinema,’ she says. As she approaches the end of her life, its beginning seems to her ever more vivid. Details float up, conversations, incidents, stories, snippets of life seen as tiny film clips, which she notes down in order to tell me the next time I come over. She knows I know the dramatis personae so well by now that they need no introduction.

‘Did I tell you what I remembered about Uncle Yasha and the girls he picked up in his Mercedes? What Varya said?’ she asks over the phone, and I know immediately that she’s talking about a famously immoral automobile my great-uncle Yakov shipped back from Berlin in 1946, and the fury that this invoked in my great-aunt. ‘She was so furious that she threw all the flowerpots in the house at him, and the crockery from the kitchen. Yasha couldn’t stop laughing, even as the plates smashed around him. That’s what made her most angry!’

Lenina sees the world in terms of conversations, tones of voice, people. She doesn’t read much, unlike her sister, my bookish mother. She’s a performer, with the kitchen table as her auditorium and an ever-changing set of friends, supplicants, former students, neighbours and relatives as the audience.

Lyudmila and Lenina’s story begins in another kitchen in a handsome, high-ceilinged apartment in the centre of Chernigov in midsummer 1937. The tall windows stood wide open to catch the breeze off the River Desna. In a corner, my three-year-old mother was playing with a rag doll. My aunt Lenina leaned on the wide window sill, watching the street for the sleek silhouette of her father’s big black official Packard. She was twelve years old, round-faced with large, intelligent eyes. She was fashionably dressed in her favourite white cotton tennis skirt, copied from a Moscow magazine. Outside, across the tops of the plane trees of Lermontov Street, she could see the golden domes of the cathedral of Chernigov’s medieval Kremlin.

At the kitchen table her mother Martha fussed over a packed lunch for her husband Boris: roast chicken, boiled eggs and cucumber, some biscuits, a pinch of salt wrapped in newspaper, all packed in greaseproof paper. Boris was due to stop by on his way to the station to pick up his luggage before setting off to go on holiday at a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Black Sea coast. It was to be his first holiday in three years.

Martha was complaining to no one in particular that her husband was late again, which was typical, just typical. Boris was so obsessed with work that he couldn’t even take the morning off on the day his holiday was due to begin. He always seemed to have more time for his Party committees than for his family.

Martha was a tall, sturdy woman, already running to the plumpness Russian peasant women often acquire along with motherhood. She was wearing a dress of imported cotton and carefully applied make-up. Her voice seemed always to be nagging, or so it seemed to Lenina, who was dreading the idea of a week alone with her mother without her father to intercede. At the sink stood Varya, the family’s long-suffering housemaid, a sturdy country girl who wore a wide sarafan, the Russian peasant woman’s traditional dress, with a starched apron pinned to the front. Varya slept in a kind of cupboard at the end of the hall, but she earned money and was fed, so she put up with Martha, and worse. She winked at Lenina when they caught each other’s eye as Martha rushed out of the kitchen, grumbling, to check Boris’s luggage, which was standing in the wide hallway.

Lyudmila – or Mila for short – was as devoted to her elder sister Lenina as a little dog, and preferred not to let her sibling out of her sight. The girls had a complicity with their father, a mutual defence pact which Martha disliked and didn’t understand.

Lenina, at the window, saw her father’s big black car round the corner and roll to a halt in front of the apartment block. There was a clatter on the stairs and Boris bounded in to the apartment. He was a powerfully built man, running to fat, prematurely bald with a shaved head. He wore self-consciously proletarian clothes, plain linen shirts in summer and sailor’s striped vests in winter. He looked much older than his thirty-four years. He was already the second most powerful man in the city, Secretary for Propaganda and Agitation of the Communist Party’s Regional Committee. A noted political agitator, rising star within the Party, a holder of the Order of Lenin, Boris was serving his apprenticeship in a provincial administration as a prelude to a powerful post in Kiev or even Moscow. He was a man going places. Ignoring his wife’s tirade of scolding and advice, he quickly kissed his two daughters goodbye.

‘Be good, look after your mother and sister,’ he whispered to Lenina.

He silenced his wife with a quick embrace, exchanged a few parting words with her, grabbed his packed case and lunch and ran downstairs. Lenina rushed to the window and saw her father’s driver standing by the car, smoking a cigarette, which he tossed away as he heard his boss coming down the stone staircase. Lenina waved frantically as her beloved Papa climbed into his car, and he waved back, quickly, a sweeping gesture more like a salute. It was the last time she ever saw him.

After she had seen her husband off, Martha went across the landing to see if anything was wrong with the neighbours. She hadn’t heard the usual thud of their door closing as the family went to work in the morning, and nobody had come home for lunch. When Martha returned Lenina noticed she was pale and nervous. There had been no response when she rang their doorbell. Then she’d seen a stamped paper pasted on to the door bearing the seal of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD. She knew immediately what it meant. The Bibikovs’ neighbours, the family of a colleague of her husband’s, had been arrested in the night.

The next morning there was a tiredness in Martha’s eyes as she dressed little Lyudmila, a peremptoriness in her tone as she dragooned the children for a shopping expedition, squashing cotton summer cloche hats on to their heads.

On the way to the market, Martha stopped to tie little Lyudmila’s shoelace. As she crouched, a young girl about Lenina’s age walked silently up to them. She leaned over to Martha’s ear and whispered something, then walked hurriedly away. Instead of standing up, Martha sank down on to her knees on the pavement like a shot animal. Her children tried to help her up, alarmed. In a few moments she recovered, stood, and turned back home, dragging Lyudmila as she stumbled to keep pace. Years later, Martha told Lenina what the girl had said: ‘Tonight they will come with a search warrant.’ Nobody knew who the girl was, or who had sent her.

Back in the apartment, Martha began to cry. She had been parted from her husband only once in their twelve years of marriage, when he went away to serve in the Red Army soon after they had met. And now he was gone, and the world they had made was about to fly apart.

That night the children went to bed hungry after a supper of kitchen scraps their mother had hurriedly thrown together. Martha couldn’t sleep, she told Lenina later, and spent half the night doing laundry. Then she sat by the open window listening for the sound of a car. She fell asleep just before dawn, and never heard it.

Martha was woken by a sharp knocking on the door. She looked at her watch; it was just after four in the morning. Martha pulled on a dressing gown and opened the door. Four men stood outside, all wearing black leather jackets with pistol belts, and leather boots. Their officer showed her a search warrant and an arrest warrant for her husband. He asked if Bibikov was at home. Martha said no, he was away, and began pleading for an explanation. The men pushed past her and started to search the apartment. The children were woken by the sound of voices. Lyudmila began crying. A man opened the door of their room, switched on the light briefly, looked around and told the children to be quiet. Lyudmila got into bed with Lenina and cried herself back to sleep. Their mother distractedly came in to comfort them to the sounds of drawers being rifled through and cupboards emptied in the next room.

The men stayed for twelve hours, systematically searching every book, every file in Boris’s study. The men did not allow Martha to go to the kitchen to feed the children. Lenina remembers their faces, ‘hard as their leather coats’. When they had finished the search, confiscating a boxful of documents they made Martha sign for, the NKVD officers sealed the apartment’s four rooms and left Martha and her children in the kitchen, still in their nightdresses. As the door slammed shut, Martha collapsed on the floor in tears. Lyudmila and Lenina also began bawling, hugging their mother.

When Martha managed to pull herself together, she went into the bathroom and wrung out a wet dress. Wiping her face in the bathroom mirror, she told Lenina to look after her sister, and left the house. She ran to the local NKVD headquarters, sure that their family had been the victim of some terrible mistake. She came back to the children late that night, empty-handed and desperate. She had found out almost nothing, except that she was just one of dozens of panicking wives who had besieged the stony-faced receptionist with questions about their missing husbands, only to be told that the men were ‘under investigation’ and that the women would be kept informed.

Though Martha didn’t know it at the time, her husband was still a free man, relaxing in a first-class sleeper coach heading south and innocently looking forward to his well-earned days of rest at the Party sanatorium.