Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

2. ‘Not Men but Giants!’

There are only two surviving photographs of Boris Bibikov.

One is an informal group shot taken at the Kharkov Tractor Factory around 1932. He is sitting on the ground in front of two dozen fresh-faced, beaming young workers, his arm around the shoulder of a crew-cut young man. Bibikov is wearing a rumpled, open-necked shirt and his head is shaven, in the proletarian style affected by many of his generation of Party cadres. Unlike everyone else in the photo, there is no smile on his face, only a severe glare.

The other photo, from his Party card, was taken early in 1936. Bibikov is wearing a Party cadre’s tunic, buttoned to the neck, and he once again stares purposefully from the frame. There is more than a hint of cruelty in his down-turned mouth. He is every inch the ruthless Party man. The formality of the pose and the fact that Bibikov was born in an age before one felt entirely unselfconscious in front of a camera mean that the mask is near perfect. There is no hint of the man in either picture, only of the man he wanted to be.

He died a man without a past. Like many of his age and class, Bibikov shed his former self like a shameful skin, to be reborn as a Homo Sovieticus, a new Soviet man. He reinvented himself so effectively that even the NKVD investigators who painstakingly chronicled his passage through the NKVD’s ‘meat grinder’ in the summer and autumn of 1937 were able to unearth only the merest trace of his former existence. There were no photos, no papers, no records of his life before the Party.

His family were descended from one of Catherine the Great’s generals, Alexander Bibikov, who earned the Empress’s favour and a noble title by putting down a peasant uprising led by Emeliyan Pugachev in 1773. The revolt was crushed with great brutality, just as the Empress ordered; summary hangings and beatings were meted out to thousands of rebels who had dared to defy the state.

Boris Bibikov was born in the Crimea in 1903 or 1904 – his NKVD file says the former, his mother writes the latter. His father Lev, a small landowner, died when Boris and his two brothers, Yakov and Isaac, were very young. Bibikov never talked about him. Their mother, Sofia, was a Jewess from a well-to-do Crimean merchant family whose father Naum owned a flour mill and a grain elevator, which could account for the odd ‘profession’ Bibikov listed on his arrest form, ‘mill worker’. Boris knew English, he did not fight in the Civil War. That is just about all we know of his early life. Yakov, the only one of the Bibikov brothers to survive past the Second World War, who lived until 1979, was similarly obsessive – he never mentioned his background, or his executed brother. For the Bibikov brothers there was only the future, no looking back.

I don’t believe that my grandfather was a hero, but he lived in heroic times, and such times brought out an impulse to greatness in people large and small. The slogans of the Bolshevik Revolution were Peace, Land and Bread; and at the time this message must, to ambitious and idealistic men, have seemed fresh, vibrant and couched in the language of prophesy. The Party’s cadres were to be nothing less than the avant-garde of world history. At some point soon after the October Revolution swept away the old Russia Bibikov seems, like many members of the ‘former classes’, to have had some sort of romantic epiphany. Or perhaps – who now knows – it was an impulse of ambition, vanity or greed. His inheritance, his maternal grandfather’s minor Crimean flour-milling empire, was nationalized in 1918. Many of his grander relatives in Moscow and Petrograd had fled into exile or been arrested as class enemies. The Bolsheviks were Russia’s new masters, and the route to advancement for an energetic and intelligent young man was to join the winning side, as quickly as possible.

But the only witness we have left is Lenina, and her testimony is that her father was a high-minded and selfless man. And even if that wasn’t the case, Lenina’s word has a kind of emotional truth of its own. So let us say that a new world was being built, and Boris’s imagination was caught by the grandeur of the vision, fresh, new and beautiful, and so he and his two younger brothers, Yakov and Isaac, threw themselves wholeheartedly into it.

During the last year of the Civil War Boris enrolled in the newly opened Higher Party School in the Crimean port of Simferopol. The school was designed to train a new generation of commissars to rule the great empire which the Bolsheviks had recently won, much to their own surprise. After a year’s training in theoretical Marxist-Leninism and the rudiments of agitation and propaganda, my grandfather was inducted into the Party in May 1924, a young firebrand of twenty-one, ready to serve the Revolution wherever it needed him.

As it turned out, the Revolution’s most pressing immediate need was a prosaic one. Boris was sent to supervise the summer tomato and aubergine harvest at a fledgling collective farm in Kurman Kimilchi, a former Tatar settlement populated for two centuries by ethnic Germans, in the highlands of the Crimean peninsula. It was there, in the dusty summer fields, that he met his future wife, Martha Platonovna Shcherbak.

A few weeks before she met Boris, Martha Shcherbak had left her younger sister Anna to die on a train platform in Simferopol.

The two girls were on their way from their native village near Poltava, in the western Ukraine, to look for summer work on the farms of the Crimea. Martha, already twenty-three years old, was well past the age when peasant girls of her generation were expected to marry. They came from a family of eleven sisters; two brothers had died in infancy. There is little doubt that her father, Platon, considered having so many daughters nothing less than a curse and seems to have been only too glad to get rid of two of them.

Martha grew up amid the brooding suspicion and casual brutality of a dirt-poor village on the Ukrainian steppes. But even by the hard standards of Russian peasant life, her siblings found Martha quarrelsome, jealous and difficult. That may explain why she had failed to find a husband in her village, and why she and Anna were the two sisters deemed surplus to requirements and sent away to fend for themselves. Her father’s rejection was the first, and perhaps deepest, of the many scars on her mind which were to develop into a deep, vicious streak.

By the time Anna and Martha reached Simferopol they had been living rough for at least a week, travelling on local trains and catching lifts on produce trucks. Anna had developed a fever, and in the crowds thronging the sweltering railway platform she fell into a dead faint. People gathered around the girl, who was turning blue and shivering. Someone shouted ‘Typhus!’ and panic spread. Martha stepped away from her sister, and turned to flee with the rest.

Martha was young, frightened, and alone for the first time after a life in the oppressive intimacy of the family’s wooden farmhouse. Her fear of being quarantined in one of the notorious and deadly local typhus hospitals was perhaps rational enough. But her decision to abandon her sister was to haunt her for the rest of her life, an original sin for which she was cruelly punished. Driven by fear, no doubt, and confusion, Martha disclaimed all knowledge of the feverish teenager sprawled on the platform. She joined the crowd piling on to the first westbound train.

Many years later, after both mother and daughter had been through half a lifetime of horrors, Martha told her daughter Lenina the story of her sister’s presumed death. But Martha mentioned the incident casually, pretending that it was perfectly normal. Something was broken inside her, or perhaps it had never been there.

Even as a small child, I feared my grandmother Martha. When she came to visit us in 1976 it was the first and only time she left the Soviet Union, and her first flight in an aeroplane. Before her trip to England, the longest journey she had made was as a Gulag prisoner in a train to Kazakhstan, and again on her way back. In the heavy suitcases she brought to London she had packed her own set of thick cotton bed sheets, as was the custom for Soviet travellers.

When Martha moved her limbs seemed impossibly cumbersome, as though her body were a burden to her. She wore the cheapest possible Soviet print dresses and heavy carpet slippers at home; when she went out she would put on a musty tweed twinset. She almost never smiled. At the family dinner table she would sit grim and impassive, as though disapproving of the bourgeois luxury in which her daughter lived. Once, when I pretended that my knife and fork were drumsticks, Martha scolded me with a sudden anger which made my eyes prick with tears. I wasn’t sorry when she left. She dissolved into passionate tears as she said goodbye, which embarrassed me. ‘I’ll never see you again,’ she said to my mother, and she was right. There was no time to say much more, as my father was waiting outside in his orange Volkswagen Beetle to take her to Heathrow.

I often think of Martha now, trying to strip away the layers of hearsay and adult knowledge which have grown around her image in my mind, to recall my own memories of her. I try to imagine the pretty, buxom girl that Boris Bibikov married. I wonder how she could have had a daughter as vivacious and full of positive energy as my own mother. After unravelling some of the story of Martha’s broken life, I see that some twist in her soul turned all her energy and life force in on itself. She hated the world, and having been deprived of happiness, she tried to destroy it in everyone around her. I was a small child when I knew her. But even then, I sensed in the deadness of her eyes, the woodenness of her embrace, something eerie, and damaged.

The train from Simferopol carried Martha weswards to Kurman Kimilchi. People told her there was work to be had there, so she descended on to the dusty platform and walked to the collective farm office. She was given a cot in a jerry-built barracks for itinerant summer labourers. There she met the young commissar Boris Bibikov.

Martha and Boris’s liaison was a revolutionary marriage. He was a fast-rising and educated member of the new revolutionary élite, she a simple farm girl with impeccable proletarian credentials. There may have been an element of calculation in Bibikov’s choice. Or, perhaps more likely, it was a shotgun wedding, the result of a summer fling consummated in the high grass of a Crimean meadow on a hot summer night.

Their first daughter was born seven months after they ‘signed’ – the new jargon for civil marriage – in March 1925. Bibikov named her Lenina after the Revolution’s recently deceased leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. When Lenina was eight months old her father entered the Red Army for his military service. Martha would show Lenina the letters Bibikov sent home, would point to them and say, ‘Daddy’.

When Bibikov returned home Lenina was two years old, and she cried as the strange man came into the house. Martha told her that her Daddy had come back. Little Lenina said no, that’s not Daddy, and pointed to the tin box where Martha kept her husband’s letters – that’s Daddy in there. It was as if she had a childish premonition of the day when Boris would walk out of the door and out of their lives – and turn back into a stack of papers.

Boris Bibikov’s life only really comes into focus in 1929, when Lenina’s clearest memories of him begin, and the project to which he dedicated his career and which was to propel him to a kind of greatness was launched. In April of that year the Sixteenth Communist Party Conference approved the first Five Year Plan for the Development of the People’s Economy. The Civil War was won, the Party’s General Secretary Iosif Stalin had ousted his arch-rival Lev Trotsky, and the Plan was the Party’s grand design for creating a socialist country out of the ruins of a Russia wrecked by war and revolution. It was not just an economic project – it was, to young believers like Bibikov, no less than the blueprint for a shining socialist future.

The key to the Plan was socializing the peasants, who made up over eighty per cent of the population and were considered by the Party to be dangerously reactionary. The Revolution was predominantly urban, educated, doctrinaire -like Bibikov himself. The peasants, with their blasphemous desire to own land, their strong attachment to family, clan and church, directly challenged the Party’s monopoly over their souls. The aim was to turn the countryside into a ‘grain factory’, and the peasants into workers.

‘A hundred thousand tractors will turn the muzhik, the peasant man, into a Communist,’ wrote Lenin. As many peasants as possible were to be driven into the cities, where they would become good proletarians. Those who remained on the land were to work on vast, efficient, collective farms. And what was needed in order to make those farms efficient and free up labour for the cities was tractors. During the spring planting of 1929 there were only five tractors in use in the whole of the Ukraine. The rest of the labour was carried out by men and horses. The vast black-earthed land still moved, as it had for numberless generations, to the slow heartbeat of the seasons and the rhythms of human and animal labour.

This, the Party would change. Stalin personally ordered two giant tractor factories built in the heart of the grain belt of south-central Russia – one in Kharkov, in the Ukraine, the empire’s bread basket, and another on the edge of the empty steppes of western Kazakhstan, in Chelyabinsk, The Party also coined a slogan: ‘We will produce first-class machines, in order to more thoroughly plough up the virgin soil of the peasant consciousness!’

The Kharkov Tractor Factory, or KhTZ, was to be built on scrubland outside the city, in a bare field. The scale of the project, its sheer ambition, was staggering. For the first year of construction the Party allocated 287 million gold rubles, 10,000 workers, 2,000 horses, 160,000 tons of iron and 100,000 tons of steel. Bricks were to be made of the clay dug out for the foundations. The only machines on the site when the ground was broken were twenty-four mechanical concrete mixers and four gravel-crushers.

The vast majority of the labour force was made up of untrained peasants who had just been dispossessed of their land. Most had never seen a machine other than a horsedrawn thresher. Bricklayers knew how to build a Russian stove but had no idea how to construct a brick building, carpenters knew how to build an izba, a log cabin, with an axe, but not a barrack.

It seems appropriate to speak of these days in a heroic tone because that was certainly how Bibikov viewed himself and his mission. That the project got started, let alone finished in record time, is a testament to the ruthless faith and fanatical energy of its builders. Unlike later generations of Soviet bureaucrats, the Party men of the KhTZ were not desk-bound pen-pushers. Even discounting the hyperbole of the official accounts, reports that they worked in the mud among the bewildered, sullen and half-starved peasants are well-documented. More, they turned them not just into workers but into believers themselves. And in the absence of proper equipment or skilled workers, it was little more than pure faith – and pure fear – that turned a clay field into ninety million bricks, and from those bricks built an industrial behemoth. The whole project was to be a demonstration of how the Party’s unshakeable will could triumph over impossible odds.

Bibikov and his family lived in a large communal apartment at 4 Kuybishev Street in central Kharkov, a grand-ish place in an old bourgeois building appropriate to his rank as a rising Party official. They shared the apartment with a childless Jewish couple, Rosa and Abram Lamper. Abram was an engineer, Rosa an excellent cook. Martha’s jealous suspicion that her children preferred Rosa’s cooking to hers was spiced with her peasant’s reflexive anti-Semitism.

Bibikov would disappear for days at the factory; Lenina hardly ever saw him. An official car would arrive early in the morning to pick him up, and he would come back home very late, after Lenina had gone to bed. But he still made time at weekends to take German lessons from a beautiful and aristocratic young teacher. Because Martha suspected her husband was having an affair with this teacher, Bibikov would take Lenina with him to the lessons, walking hand in hand past the ‘Gigant’ technical university. On the way he would buy Lenina sweets. Bibikov would greet the teacher by kissing her hand – an unforgivably bourgeois gesture if performed in public. Then he would give Lenina a book to read and retire into the teacher’s room, closing the door behind him.

Some evenings he would bring factory friends back to the apartment – men like Potapenko, the head of the factory’s Party committee, and Markitan, head of the Kharkov Party. Even though he didn’t drink or smoke, Lenina remembers her father as being the life and soul of the party. She describes him as a great zavodila-Literally, a great winder-upper, an agitator, from the word zavodit, to wind up a clock. ‘I was proud to be the child of a leader – and he was a leader,’ remembers Lenina. ‘He had a magic power to enthuse people.’

Magic or not, Bibikov certainly seems to have worked with an enthusiasm bordering on the fanatical on the building of the great factory. One of his colleagues later told Lenina that her father would write, ‘Lads, let’s fulfil the Plan!’ in chalk on the lavatory wall in an effort to encourage his workers. Bibikov was also in charge of recruitment drives into the countryside and to Red Army units who were demobilizing, his task to sign up more labour. On these whistle-stop tours in trains, charabancs and cars, Bibikov and a few hand-picked workers would give speeches in praise of the KhTZ, complete with vividly coloured storyboards for the benefit of their mostly illiterate audiences. Bibikov would return from these trips dirty and exhausted. Lenina remembers her mother complaining of the lice he’d picked up from sleeping in peasant huts, and boiling his underclothes in a great enamel pot on the gas stove.

The factory’s official history was written, anonymously, in 1977. But its author, apparently a retired factory executive, was clearly an eyewitness to the momentous early days of the KhTZ. One of the history’s heroines is Varvara Shmel, a peasant girl who came to Kharkov from a remote village to join her brother on the construction site. Her time at the factory becomes a metaphor for the progress of the proletariat under the influence of the stroika, or building project. Varvara, the history recalls, amazed by her first sight of a tractor, got her hands and face covered in grease as she was examining it. The scene was observed by ‘a sardonic young man in yellow rubber boots’, a foreign correspondent visiting the site who becomes an allegory of the scoffing West, convinced of the inalterable backwardness of Russia.

‘Symbolic!’ said the foreign journalist. ‘The peasant Miss is inspecting a tractor. And what happened? She only got her face dirty. I repeat and will always repeat – that the building of this factory is an unrealistic project. I would heartily advise this Miss not to waste her time and go home to cook – what do you call it – shchi with cabbage.’

The official history claims that people ‘came from all over the Union, many answering the call of the Party and the Komsomol [the Communist Youth League]. These were people who were passionately committed to their task, giving it all their strength, true enthusiasts. They formed the basic backbone of the building, the front line of the active fighters for the creation of a sturdy foundation for the socialist economy.’

The reality was different. Most of the peasants who flocked to the site were starving refugees from a war the fledgling Soviet state had unleashed against its own people.

‘The Party is justified in shifting from a policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks [prosperous peasants] to a policy of liquidating the kulaks as a class,’ read the Central Committee’s decree of 5 January 1930. The Wannsee memorandum of 1942 which mapped out the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem is more famous – but the Soviet Communist Party’s condemnation of the kulaks to extermination was to prove twice as deadly.

Army units were mobilized to drive the peasants from their land and confiscate their ‘hoarded’ grain for the cities and for export. Officers of the NKVD went with them to weed out suspected kulaks – which in practice meant any peasant who was a little harder working than his neighbours, or who resisted the move to collective farms. The Red Army, brutalized by the horrors of the Civil War, set out on its war against the peasants in the same spirit. There were summary executions, villages were burned and their inhabitants sent on forced marches in midwinter or packed on to cattle trucks for resettlement in great slave labour camps all over the Soviet Union. The deportees were called ‘white coal’ by their guards.

‘It was a second Civil War – this time against the peasants,’ wrote Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his epic history, The Gulag Archipelago, a ‘literary investigation’ of the terror of this period. ‘It was indeed the Great Turning Point, or as the phrase had it, the Great Break. Only we are never told what it was that broke. It was the backbone of Russia.’

By early 1930, after a winter of virtual warfare – virtual because one side was unarmed – half the farms of the Ukraine had been forcibly collectivized. On 2 March 1930 Stalin published an article in Pravda, the Party’s newspaper, in which he blamed the violence and chaos of the winter months on local cadres who were ‘Dizzy with Success’. The reality was that local Party members were confused and demoralized, the peasants had abandoned the new collective farms in droves, and peasant resistance to the system and its representatives had escalated to a level which caused even Stalin to call a temporary halt.

Despite the horrors which were being played out in the countryside all around, Bibikov and the other cadres selected to build the great tractor factory pressed on.

‘When flocks of swallows returned from distant warm lands, when larks began buzzing in the air and the ground thawed under the gentle sun, the steppe began to glint with thousands of shovels,’ writes the author of the official history, in the ringing language of a Pravda editorial. But conditions were grim. Teams of workers hauled loads of fresh-dug clay on sleds because of a lack of horsepower – fully half the horses of Russia were slaughtered by starving or vengeful peasants by 1934. Carpenters knocked together 150 rough-hewn barracks for the workers, and a makeshift underground kiln fired the first bricks to build the chimney of the brick factory proper. Two railway carriages were brought up on newly laid rails, one a bath-house and the other a mobile clinic. Liquid mud squirted up through the floorboards of the workshops, and every evening rows of mud-soaked bast shoes were laid outside the barracks to dry in the spring sunshine. Slowly, the walls of the factory began to rise out of the heavy clay fields from which they were built.

It was a miracle which was being repeated all over the Soviet Union. The giant steel cities of Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Tomsk in Siberia were ordered built on bare steppe; in Sverdlovsk there was the giant heavy machinery plant, Uralmash; the other great tractor factory in Chelyabinsk, known as the ChTZ, and a factory for combine harvesters, the ‘ships of the steppe’. Across the Ukraine new metal works were going up in Krivy Rog and Zaporozhiye, new anthracite mines were being sunk in the Donetsk basin. Each day of the first Five Year Plan one new factory was founded and 115 new collective farms opened. all over the country the apparently fantastical projects handed down by the politburo in Moscow were being made a reality. Certainly, the state had proved its ruthlessness in punishing the Revolution’s enemies, and the cost of failure would doubtless be severe. But it is hard to believe that these prodigies of industrialization were created by fear alone. Behind the deluge of propaganda photographs of happy, smiling workers, I believe there lay a spark of truth. For a brief but intense moment, a genuine and fierce pride in what they were creating flowered in the men and women involved in the great project.

By the late summer of 1930, less than a year into the Five Year Plan, the fabric of the factory was in place – the walls, acres of glass roofs, chimneys, furnaces, roads, rails. A factory newspaper was set up, called Temp, or ‘pace’, to urge workers to greater productiveness, to up the pace. Bibikov was its editor-in-chief, writing regular articles and teaching courses for aspiring journalists from among the more literate workers. He also had some pieces published in Izvestiya, the great Moscow daily founded by Lenin himself. Lenina remembers him excitedly buying several copies at the newsstand on the morning that his pieces appeared. Sadly, most of the articles at the time were published with no by-line and much of the paper’s archives of the period were destroyed in the war, so what Bibikov wrote is a mystery.

Alexander Grigoryevich Kashtanyer, who worked as an intern at Temp in 1931, wrote to Lyudmila in 1963 of what he remembered of Bibikov. ‘At that time your father’s name rang around the factory. I heard the speeches of Comrade Bibikov on the factory floor, at meetings, at the building sites. I remember they were strong, pugnacious speeches. The time was turbulent, and the very name of the paper reflected the thoughts of the tractor factory workers: come on, there’s no time to waste, keep up the pace! You can be proud of your father; he was a true soldier of Lenin’s guard. Carry a bright memory of him in your hearts!’

Pravda, the Party’s newspaper, published a story on the KhTZ in February 1966 (after Bibikov’s official rehabilitation under Krushchev) which conjures the mood of its epic birth. ‘I spent Sunday at the home of [the worker] Chernoivanenko, full of chat about the present day work of the factory,’ writes the anonymous Pravda correspondent. ‘But memory kept returning us to the thirties. What a time it was! The beginning of the epoch of industrialization in the USSR! We recalled the people of the KhTZ, how they were at that time. The sternlooking but supremely fair-minded director, Svistun, the Party mass-agitator Bibikov – he was a jolly and soulful comrade, who could inspire our young people to storm difficulties, whether it was glazing a roof in record time, or tarring the floors, or installing new machinery – not by an order but simply by the passion of his convictions. “They weren’t just ordinary men,” said Chernoivanenko in a hollow voice full of suppressed passion. “They were giants!” ,

To keep the project on schedule, Bibikov championed the seemingly paradoxical system of ‘Socialist competition’ essentially, races between different shifts of workers over who could do the most work. He also gave the workers heroes chosen from among themselves: ‘Men, who by their example inspired the others to great deeds of labour and entered the history of the factory as real heroes. People of legends.’

The heroes created by Bibikov and the propaganda department of Temp were men like Dmitry Melnikov, who assembled an American ‘Marion’ fourteen-ton excavator in six days, not two weeks as the manufacturer’s guide said. These and other prodigious deeds were publicized on stengazety, hand-stencilled wall newspapers posted around the works. Those who slacked, conversely, were denounced by their colleagues: ‘I, concrete pourer of the Kuzmenko group, stood idle for three hours because of the incompetence of X,’ read one public notice displayed on a stengazeta in late 1930. ‘I demand that the hero-workers of our group are paid for these lost hours out of his pocket.’

But despite this cajoling, work had fallen behind as the thirteenth anniversary of the Revolution approached in October 1930 and the deadline for the factory’s completion loomed. At the instigation of Bibikov’s Party Committee, foremen organized ‘storm nights’ of labour, accompanied by a brass band, teams of workers racing each other.

The factory’s workers and management quickly became obsessed with these competitions, in line with a national newspaper campaign which reported these miraculous (and increasingly bizarre) feats exhaustively. One of the leitmotifs of the endless Pravda coverage became wowing foreigners and confounding their forecasts. Not to be outdone, the KhTZ soon produced its own records:

‘The [workers] also refuted the calculations of foreign experts of the productivity of the “Kaiser” cement mixer,’ the KhTZ’s history proudly records. ‘Professor Zailiger, for instance, claimed that the machine could not produce more than 240 portions of concrete in one eight-hour shift. But the Communists of the Tractor Factory decided to exceed the norm.’ Four hundred men come on the shift, heroically producing 250 mixtures. ‘Foreign specialists and their theories are not a law to us,’ foreman G.B. Marsunin boasted to the Temp correspondent.

The factory brass bands now played all night, every night, echoing in the machine hall and drowning the noise of the KhTZ’s six Kaiser concrete mixers. The foremen rushed back and forth, inciting their men to work. Over the next few months new records were set at 360 mixtures, then at 452. An all-Union rally of concrete pourers met in Kharkov to celebrate the KhTZ’s amazing records. The foreign concrete mixture specialist, the mysterious Professor Zailiger himself, came from Austria and watched in amazement – ‘Yes, you work, it’s a fact,’ Temp records him as saying.

There were prodigies of bricklaying, too. Arkady Mikunis, a young enthusiast from the Komsomol, would stay behind after work to watch old hands lay bricks and read specialist bricklaying journals in his spare time; he quickly matched his teachers with their norm of 800 bricks per shift. On a specially organized ‘storm night’ Mikunis laid 4,700 bricks in a single shift; ‘More,’ Temp records proudly, ‘than even America.’ On a factory sponsored holiday in Kiev, he was invited to show the local bricklayers his skills and laid 6,800. Word spread through the bricklaying world and a German champion came from Hamburg to see for himself – after half a shift against Mikunis he gave up the competition. And still Mikunis didn’t stop. His record rose to 11,780 bricks in one day, a somewhat improbable three times the previous world record. For his prodigious skills at speed bricklaying – apparently at the rate of a brick every four seconds for twelve straight hours Mikunis was awarded the Order of Lenin.

As if setting new records wasn’t enough, Bibikov also instigated evening classes to ‘raise the level of socialist consciousness’ of the factory’s workforce. By the spring of 1931 most of the workers, who a year before had been starving peasants digging clay, were taking voluntary evening classes to qualify as machinists and engineers. After the end of the shifts there was a crush to get to the canteen and wash before the classes began. A lucky 500 workers were even sent to Stalingrad and Leningrad to learn how to work new specialist machine tools installed in factories there. One of the many excuses Bibikov gave his long-suffering wife for his constant lateness was that he personally conducted classes in Marxist Leninism for an advanced group of foremen and managers, and mass meetings and lectures on political economy for the rank and file. One imagines lines of eager, and not-so-eager, listeners, looking up at the bald, animated figure at the lectern in his striped sailor’s shirt, soaking up information as indiscriminately as sponges, Marx and Lenin slowly displacing the no less jealous old God of the Russias with whom they had grown up.

On 31 May 1931, the Politburo’s industrial supremo Sergo Orzhonikidze was reverently shown around the nearly complete factory buildings. Orzhonikidze ordered the construction to be completed by 15 July, and the installation of the production lines to begin immediately afterwards. Unsurprisingly, given the unspoken penalties for failure, the job was done on time.

By 25 August 1931 the first trial tractors were coming off the assembly line. On 25 September the factory director sent a telegram to the Central Committee reporting that the KhTZ would be ready to start full production on 1 October as planned, just fifteen months after the ground had been broken.

Twenty thousand people assembled in the giant machine hall for the official opening. Demyan Bedny, the ‘proletarian poet’ whose pseudonym meant Demyan the Poor, was there to record the event in verse, as was a delegation of dignitaries from Moscow. A biplane flew over the site, scattering leaflets with a poem entitled ‘Hail to the Giant of the Five Year Plan’. The foreign journalist with the yellow rubber boots was there too, ‘just as sloppy, but less confident’. Varvara, the peasant girl whom he had scoffed at, had been to the factory school and was now a qualified steel-presser.

Grigori Ivanovich Petrovsky, head of the All-Ukraine Central Committee of the People’s Economy, cut the ceremonial ribbon, walked inside the hall and rode out on a bright red tractor covered in carnations and driven by champion woman worker, Marusya Bugayeva, as the factory band played the ‘Internationale’. It was followed by dozens of other tractors. One collective farm worker shouted, records the Temp special issue on the opening, ‘Comrades – But it’s a miracle!’

The Soviet satirical magazine Krokodil published the factory management’s telegram verbatim: ‘October First opening of Kharkov Tractor Factory invite editorial representative attend celebrations opening factory – Factory Director Svistun. Party Secretary Potapenko. Factory Committee Director Bibikov.’ The magazine composed a special poem in honour of the event, ‘To the Builders of the Kharkov Tractor Factory.’

But behind the universal jubilation, further catastrophe was unfolding in the countryside. The KhTZ’s tractors came too late to make an impact on the 1931 harvest, which, after the ravages of collectivization, was disastrous. The projected ‘grain factories’ were producing little more than half of what the same countryside had yielded five years before. The peasants’ only way to protest against the loss of their land and homes was to slaughter their animals and eat as much of their food supplies as they could before the commissars came. Eyewitnesses from the Red Cross reported seeing peasants ‘drunk on food’, their eyes stupefied by their mad, self-destructive gluttony, and the knowledge of its consequences.

Unsurprisingly, they worked unwillingly for the new state farms. Yet the state demanded grain not only to feed the cities but also to export for hard currency in order to buy foreign machinery for projects like the KhTZ. Soviet engineers were sent to the United States and Germany to buy steam hammers, sheet steel rolling machines and presses with trunkloads of Soviet gold, all earned from selling grain at Depression prices. The KhTZ’s American steam hammer, which Bibikov was later accused of sabotaging, cost 40,000 rubles in gold, the equivalent of nearly a thousand tons of wheat, enough to feed a million people for three days.

In October 1931 the Soviet government requisitioned 7.7 million tons of a meagre total harvest of 18 million tons. Most went to feed the cities, strongholds of Soviet power, though two million tons was exported to the West. The result was one of the greatest famines of the century.

During the expropriations of 1929 and 1930 individual villages had starved if they resisted the commissars, who punitively confiscated all the food they could find. Now, as the winter of 1931 set in, hunger gripped the whole of the Ukraine and southern Russia. Millions of peasants became refugees, flocking to the cities, dying on the pavements of Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov and Odessa. Armed guards were posted on trains travelling through famine areas so they wouldn’t be stormed. One of the most haunting images of the Russian century is a photograph of hollow-faced peasants caught selling dismembered children for meat on a market stall in the Ukraine.

The new vast fields of collective farms had watchtowers on the perimeter, like those of the Gulags, to watch for corn thieves. A law was introduced mandating a minimum of ten years of hard labour for stealing corn – one court in Kharkov sentenced 1,500 corn gatherers to death in a month. The towers were manned by young Pioneers, the Communist Children’s League (for children aged ten to fifteen). Fourteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov became a national hero in 1930 when he denounced his own father to the authorities for not handing over kulak property to the local collective farm. The tale-telling Pavlik was subsequently, perhaps not unreasonably, murdered by his grandfather. The story of this young revolutionary martyr became front-page news in Pravda and prompted books and songs about his heroism.

‘There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness,’ wrote Boris Pasternak after a trip to the Ukraine. The young Hungarian Communist Arthur Koestler found the ‘enormous land wrapped in silence’. The British socialist Malcolm Muggeridge took a train to Kiev, where he found the population starving. ‘I mean starving in its absolute sense, not undernourished,’ he wrote. Worse, Muggeridge found that the grain supplies that did exist were being given to army units brought in to keep starving peasants from revolting. Embittered, the idealistic Muggeridge left the Soviet Union, convinced he had witnessed ‘one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.’

Even hardened revolutionaries like Politburo member Nikolai Bukharin were horrified. ‘During the Revolution I saw things that I would not want even my enemies to see. Yet 1919 cannot be compared to what happened between 1930 and 1932,’ Bukharin wrote shortly before he was shot in 1938 in the Purges. ‘In 1919 we were fighting for our lives… but in the later period we were conducting a mass annihilation of completely defenceless men together with their wives and children.’

The famine was not just a disaster – it was a weapon deliberately used against the peasants. ‘It took a famine to show them who is master here,’ a senior Party official told Victor Kravchenko, a Party planning apparatchik who defected to the US in 1949. ‘It has cost millions of lives… but we have won the war.’

Bibikov must have seen the hunger too – the pinched faces, the bloated bellies and the empty eyes. He travelled often on Party and factory business in his black Packard, or in firstclass train carriages with guards in the corridors. He must have known that special trucks, on secret orders from the municipal authorities, patrolled the cities of the Ukraine at night to collect the corpses of peasants who had crawled there from the villages. Many must have made it to the barbed-wire perimeter of the KhTZ, on the outskirts of the city. By morning there was no trace, for those who chose not to see, of the horror which was unfolding all around. George Bernard Shaw declared, after a carefully stage-managed tour of the Ukraine in 1932, that he ‘did not see a single undernourished person in Russia’. Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent, dismissed reports of famine as anti-Soviet propaganda. To the Party, starving peasants were simply the waste-matter of revolution, to be ignored until they obligingly died – and then forgotten. The Party’s leaders wanted the world to see only the shining achievements, not the price which was being paid for them.

Bibikov made sure his family knew nothing. Lenina’s memory of those years in Kharkov is of bazaars filled with fruits and vegetables, and her father coming home laden with sausages from the factory’s canteen and boxes of sweets for the children. She doesn’t remember wanting for anything. What did Bibikov think, as he tucked those paper-wrapped sausages into his briefcase as dusk fell, bringing the night and its crop of starved and desperate wanderers? He thought, I am quite sure, thank God it’s them, instead of us.

The convulsions of collectivization two years previously could be explained away as a war against the Revolution’s class enemies, the kulaks. But now those enemies had been liquidated and the collective farms of the future established. Yet even those blinded by ideology could scarcely fail to see that the Workers’ and Peasants’ State was, painfully obviously, failing to feed its own people. Moreover, for all the glorious achievements of industrialization, it was equally clear that the whole dream of Socialism was being held together increasingly by coercion. Already in October 1930 a law forbade the free movement of labour, tying peasants to their land and workers to their factories, as in the days of serfdom. In December 1932 internal passports were introduced in an effort to stem the exodus of the starving into the cities.

Does Bibikov’s decision to continue believing, in the face of mounting evidence that the dream was becoming a nightmare, make him a cynical man? It’s hard to know, since first and foremost he had little choice but to follow the Party line. The alternative was to join the starving, or worse. Yet he was clearly intelligent enough to understand that terrible cracks were appearing in the paradise he had spent his adult life fighting for.

Perhaps, like many of his generation, he convinced himself of that greatest of twentieth-century heresies: that bourgeois sentimentality had no place in the heart of a servant of a higher humanity. Maybe he believed that the Party would ultimately create a brave new world from all this chaos. Or perhaps, less self-righteously, he convinced himself that his duty was to do what he could to conquer the backwardness of Russia, with its famines and grinding poverty, by helping to forge it into a modern, industrial nation. Most likely, though, is a more human explanation: it was much easier to live by one’s myths, and to continue to believe in the ultimate wisdom of the Party, than to speak out and risk disaster.

Yet the famine-ravaged country Bibikov saw during the winter of 1931-32 seems to have profoundly altered him. The Party was always right, yes – but the Party’s tactics might at least be altered. Like many Party leaders in the Ukraine who had seen the horrors which Stalin’s hard line produced first hand, Bibikov became convinced that Stalin’s rule must be softened if further disaster was to be averted. His chance to speak out came eighteen months later, shortly before the birth of his second daughter, my mother, Lyudmila Borisovna Bibikova.