Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

4. Arrest

Even after years in Moscow, I could never quite shake the feeling of being in a weird cat’s cradle of conflicting ages. There were quaintly historic touches: soldiers in jackboots and breeches; babushkas in headscarves; ragged, bearded beggars straight out of Dostoyevsky; obligatory coat checks and rotary phones; fur hats; drivers and maids; bread with lard; abacuses instead of cash registers; inky newspapers; the smell of wood smoke and outdoor toilets in the suburbs; meat sold from trucks piled with beef carcasses manned by a muzhik with a bloody axe. Some rhythms of life seemed absolutely unchanged from my father’s day, my grandfather’s day even.

There were a few moments when I think I caught glimpses of the nightmare world my grandfather entered in July 1937. For a few hours, I saw and smelt and touched it. It was enough, perhaps, to give a sense of what it was like, at least physically. What it was like in his head and heart is a place I never wish to visit.

One night in early January 1996, a month after I had visited Kiev to view my grandfather’s file, I was walking through a light snowfall towards the Metropole Hotel. I was trying to catch a taxi, and didn’t notice that three men were following me. The first I knew of their approach was the sleeve of a yellow sheepskin coat coming up at my face, followed by a powerful blow to the jaw. I felt no pain, just percussion, like a jolting train. For two or three minutes of strangely balletic time, I stood, I fell again, I scrambled up, as the men continued to beat me. I smelled the wet fur of my hat as I pressed it to my face to protect my nose.

Then I saw, as I lay on the street, the caked front wheels and dirty headlights of a red Lada crunching through the snow towards us. Improbably enough, a man with his left leg in a huge plaster cast levered himself out of the passenger door. He shouted something, and the three men looked suddenly embarrassed and began wandering away with looks of feigned innocence. The men in the car helped me up, then drove off.

At that moment, a police jeep rounded the corner. I flagged it down, opened the door, mumbled what had happened, and got in. At the moment we picked up speed down Neglinnaya Street in pursuit of the assailants, I suddenly felt my brain clear, and time suddenly shifted gears in tandem with the police driver from very slow to very fast. We pulled out on to Okhotny Ryad and I saw my assailants playing in the snow by the Lubyanka Metro. The jeep pulled a stylish power slide across eight lanes of traffic and skidded to a halt.

The three men were reaching for their passports, looking calm and happily drunk, smiling, thinking it was a routine document check. Two had the Asiatic features of Tatars, the third was a Russian. When they saw me clamber out of the jeep they froze and seemed to shrink a size.

‘Those are the men,’ I said, theatrically, pointing at them. The two Tatars were bundled into a tiny cage in the back of the jeep. No more than a dozen minutes had passed since they had begun beating me.

The police station was impregnated with the eternal Russian prison odour of sweat, piss and despair. The walls were pale institutional beige at the top and dark brown at the bottom. My two assailants sat in a cage in the corner of the reception room, their heads in their hands, muttering to each other and occasionally looking up at me.

The desk sergeant sat behind a Perspex screen, his little office raised a foot above the rest of the room. In front of him were several large, Victorian-looking ledgers, a set of stamps, a pile of forms, and an ashtray made out of a Fanta can. He took my details impassively, then picked up his telephone and dialled his superiors. From that moment, I think, the men’s fate was sealed. I was a foreigner, and that meant trouble for the police if the case wasn’t handled properly – consular complaints to the Foreign Ministry, paperwork flying.

The investigator appointed to the case was Svetlana Timofeyevna, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. She was a confident and matronly woman who sized me up with a shameless, penetrating stare, well used to separating men into wimps and loudmouths. She was one of those portly, invincible, middle-aged Russian women, whose kind lurked like Dobermanns in the front offices of all Russia’s great men; they ruled ticket offices and lorded it over hotel reception desks.

With great reverence, after we had been through the details several times verbally, Svetlana Timofeyevna pulled out a blank statement sheet headed Protokol, or official statement, and began to take down the official record of my testimony. I signed the bottom of each page and initialled each correction. Finally she reached for a blank folder headed Delo, or criminal case, and carefully filled in the accused’s details on its brown cardboard cover. The file had begun. From that moment on, I, my assailants, the investigators, were all its creatures.

For the next three days I staggered over to the police station at Svetlana Timofeyevna’s summons, groggy with mild concussion. The station was even more depressing in daylight, a low, two-storey concrete building in a courtyard full of dirty slush, litter bins and stray dogs. I met the policemen who had been with me on the night of the assault, and one of them assured me, in a confiding whisper, that ‘we made sure those guys are having an interesting time’. I felt a guilty thrill of revenge.

Between long, fitful sleeps in my sunless third-floor apartment and long afternoons in the station, it seemed that I had somehow slipped into a pungent underworld, where I endlessly watched the investigator’s pen crawling across reams of paper, my head throbbing, willing it to finish. I dreamt of it at night, a feverish frustration dream, obsessively focused on the crawling pen, the way it dented the cheap official paper, held by a disembodied hand and lit by harsh, institutional lamplight.

On the third day – but somehow it seemed like so much longer than three days, this waking-sleeping bureaucratic nightmare – I felt like an old-timer, trudging up the police station’s worn stairs, past the stinking officers’ toilet from which the seat had been stolen. I found Svetlana Timofeyevna in uniform for the first time since I’d met her.

‘We’re going to have the ochnaya stavka now,’ she said. The ochnaya stavka, or confrontation, was a standard Russian investigative procedure in which the accused meets his accusers and their statements are read to each other. She scooped up the swelling file and led me downstairs to what looked like a large schoolroom, full of rows of benches facing a raised dais, where we took our seats in silence. I stared at the grain of the desk.

The men came in so quietly I didn’t hear them until the policeman shut the door. They were both manacled, shuffling stiffly with heads bowed. They sat down heavily in the front benches, looking up at us sheepishly like guilty schoolboys. They were brothers, Svetlana Timofeyevna had told me, Tatars from Kazan. Both were married, with children, and lived in Moscow. They looked younger than I had imagined them, and smaller.

‘Matthews, please forgive us if we hurt you, please, if there’s anything we can do…’ the smaller man, the older brother, began. But Svetlana Timofeyevna cut him off. She read my clumsy statement, in the longest of its four versions, then a medical report. They listened in silence; the younger one had his head in his hands. Their own testimony was just five sentences, stating that they had been too drunk to remember what happened and that they freely admitted their guilt and contrition. At the end of each statement there was an awkward moment as she passed the accused papers to sign. Helpfully, I pushed the papers further forward on the desk so that they could sign in their clanking handcuffs. They nodded in polite acknowledgement each time.

‘Do you have anything to say?’

The elder brother, still in his yellow coat, began talking. He was calm at first, a forced chumminess in his voice. He held my eye, and as he spoke I stopped hearing what he was saying and just felt its tone, and read the look. He was begging me to spare them. My face was frozen in a kind of horrified smile. He leaned further forward, a note of panic creeping into his voice. Then he fell on his knees and wept. He wept loudly, and his brother wept silently.

Then they were gone. Svetlana Timofeyevna was saying something, but I didn’t hear. She had to repeat herself, and touch my shoulder. She was saying we should go. I mumbled something about dropping the charges. She sighed heavily, and told me, wearily, as though she was trying to explain life’s hard facts to a child, that it wouldn’t be possible. She was not a hard-hearted woman, even after years of busting stupid little people for stupid little crimes. Yet even though she had seen the men’s weeping wives and knew the case was trivial, unworthy of the terrible retribution which she was about to unleash, she knew that that afternoon she would type up a full report recommending that the two men be remanded in custody pending trial.

We were all caught up in it now, the momentum, the grinding wheels. My foreignness meant all this was to be done by the book. The file, the all-important file. We were all forced to follow its course now, step by step, because what had been written could not be unwritten.

The two men spent eleven and a half months in the Butirskaya Prison, one of the most notorious jails in Russia, waiting for a trial date. I eventually got a summons to the trial, but was too scared to go. A friend went instead, to present my excuses. He heard that both brothers had come down with tuberculosis in jail. Even in the absence of the victim, they were convicted, and given a sentence matching the time they’d already served on remand. They had lost their jobs and their families had gone back to Tatarstan. By the time I heard the news the shock and even the memory of the night our lives collided so disastrously had faded. The story was lost, I tried to convince myself, in the Babel of horror stories which swirled in the newsroom where I worked. It was perverse, I told myself, to mourn the fate of guilty men when every day the papers which piled on my desk in drifts were full of terrifying stories of the suffering of innocents.

But the memory of the horror and the guilt I felt as those two men grovelled before me was buried deep, and it festered. Many Russians, I believe, carry a similar black slime inside themselves made of trauma and guilt and wilful forgetting. It makes a rich compost in which all their hedonism, their treachery, their every pleasure and betrayal, takes root. It’s not the same for the cosseted Europeans among whom I grew up, though many of them were convinced they had suffered parental indifference, spousal cruelty or personal failure. No, the average Russian seventeen-year-old, I concluded from my years of wandering the nastier side of the new Russia, had already seen more real abuse and hopelessness and corruption and injustice than most of my English friends had seen in a lifetime. And to survive and be happy, Russians have so much to bury, to wilfully ignore. Small wonder that the intensity of their pleasures and indulgences is so sharp; it has to match the quality of their suffering.

For days after the Bibikovs’ Chernigov apartment was searched there was no news. Boris did not return from his holiday. The NKVD kept telling Martha that she would be informed as soon as there were any developments. Varya was sent away to her relatives in the country, and Martha and her two daughters lived in the apartment’s bathroom and the kitchen because all the other rooms were locked and sealed. Martha bought food with the money she had left in her purse, and accepted the charity of their remaining neighbours.

Bibikov’s colleagues knew nothing – in fact many had themselves disappeared, and the rest were either terrified or naïvely confident that the NKVD would soon correct its error.

There was a moment of panic when Martha left the children alone to eat their cherry soup, a Ukrainian summer treat, while she went once again to the NKVD office for news. Lenina was reading a book her father had given her, and didn’t notice that her little sister Lyudmila had stuffed all the cherry stones up her nose so far that they could not be extracted.

‘I’m a money box,’ Lyudmila told her sister as she pushed up another stone. There was uproar when their mother returned. Lyudmila was rushed to hospital to have the stones extracted by a stern nurse with long forceps apparently kept for the purpose. Lenina was given a hard smacking for her negligence, and wept because she could not go to her father for comfort.

After nearly two weeks of worry, Martha decided the only thing left to do was to send Lenina to Moscow to her husband’s well-connected brothers. Surely they could pull some strings and find out something about what had happened? She had no money to buy a ticket, so she wrapped a pair of silver spoons from the kitchen in a napkin and went to the station to beg a seat from a conductress on one of the Kiev-Moscow expresses which passed through Chernigov late at night. The conductress stowed Lenina on a luggage rack and told her not to move. She also told Martha to keep the spoons. Martha ran down the platform as the train pulled out, keeping pace as it gathered speed until she couldn’t keep up any more.

Ten years before, Martha’s father had sent her away from the home where she’d grown up. On a station platform in Simferopol, she had abandoned her dying sister to her fate. Now, as she stood watching the lights of the train bearing her elder daughter to Moscow recede into the night, Martha realized that the new family she had made was falling apart. She went to the telegraph office and sent a short telegram to her husband’s relatives in Moscow telling them that Lenina was on her way. Then she walked home. She found Lyudmila asleep on a blanket on the kitchen floor, picked her up in her arms and, she told Lenina later, ‘howled like a wounded animal’.

At Kursky Station in Moscow Lenina was met by her uncle Isaac, Boris’s younger brother. Their other brother, Yakov, an Air Force officer, was serving on the Far Eastern Staff in Khabarovsk, near Vladivostok, and was still unaware of Boris’s arrest. Isaac was twenty-three, a promising engineer at the Dynamo aircraft engine factory. He embraced his young niece and told her to save her story till after they’d ridden home on the tram to the small apartment he shared with his and Boris’s mother, Sophia. In the kitchen they listened to Lenina’s story in silence. Lenina began crying, sobbing that she didn’t know what her father had done wrong. Isaac tried to reassure her. It was all a misunderstanding, he told her, he knew people who could sort it out.

The next day Isaac spoke to a friend of his at the Dynamo factory, one of the resident NKVD political officers. The man had until recently been one of the personal bodyguards of a senior NKVD general. The political officer said he’d ask his old colleagues and see if he could arrange an interview to sort out what he was tactful enough to call a ‘terrible mistake’.

Two days later, Isaac came home early, told Lenina to put on her best summer dress and took her by the hand to the tram stop. They travelled to the NKVD’s headquarters on Lubyanka Square in silence. The Lubyanka itself was a huge and bourgeois building which had once housed a pre-revolutionary insurance company. By 1937 it had been extended, its cellars converted to a sizeable prison and interrogation centre which was by then bursting with the Purge’s nightly crop of new victims. Isaac and his niece went in to the main entrance, presented Isaac’s passport to the desk sergeant and were shown upstairs to a waiting room. A man in a dark green NKVD uniform, with breeches and leather boots, came to speak briefly to Isaac – evidently the friend who had arranged the meeting.

When they were finally shown in to the office Lenina first thought it was empty. There was a huge dark wooden desk, with a bright lamp on it. The heavy curtains were half drawn, despite the summer sunshine outside. There were tall windows and a thick carpet. And then she noticed, behind the desk, a small, balding, bespectacled head. The general, Lenina thought, ‘looked like a gnome’.

The gnome looked up at Isaac and the little girl, and asked why they were there. Isaac, faltering, began to explain that his brother, a good and loyal Communist, had been arrested due to some mistake, some oversight, perhaps excessive zeal on the part of his men in rooting out the enemies of the state. The general picked up a flimsy file from his desk as he listened, flipped through it as Isaac talked, and said one word: ‘Razberemsya’ – ‘We’ll sort it out.’ That was the end of the meeting. Isaac, shaken, took Lenina home and the next day put her on a train back to Chernigov. A few days later, Martha sold whatever kitchenware she could and bought train tickets for herself and her children to the Crimea, to stay with her elder sister Feodosia. But before she left she dutifully filed her whereabouts with the Chernigov NKVD, so that her husband wouldn’t worry when he returned to an empty apartment after the misunderstanding was rectified.

Winter closed in, and there was still no news. Martha and the children lived in the kitchen of Feodosia’s small wooden house on the outskirts of Simferopol. It was a rude fall from grace after their life as members of the pampered Party élite in Chernigov. Martha got a job as a nurse in a children’s hospital for infectious diseases, and would bring leftover food from the hospital home for the children.

The climate of the Crimea is milder than European Russia, but the winter brings a cold sea wind off the Bay of Sevastopol. Feodosia’s draughty house was heated with a small metal stove known as a burzhuika – a ‘bourgeois’ stove which burned hot and quickly, but was cold by morning. The children weren’t allowed to light it during the day while Martha was at the hospital, and they sat by the window, huddled in sweaters, watching the rain fall on the small orchard which surrounded their house.

Life was elsewhere, Lenina thought, during those slow months. She missed the bustle of their life in Chernigov, their neighbours and her school friends and the endless stream of officials and friends who would sit late into the night in their kitchen. But most of all she missed her father, who had been her refuge and her best friend. She never stopped believing that he was alive and well, somewhere, missing her as she missed him.

Lyudmila had always been a quiet child, but now she seemed to withdraw into herself. She played with her dolls in a corner of the floor of Feodosia’s kitchen, next to the trunk on which Lenina slept, trying to stay out of the way of her scolding mother and aunt. Martha came home late and exhausted, her hair a straggling mess. Since her husband’s arrest she had given up on her appearance.

In early December Lyudmila fell ill with measles. It seems she had caught it from the food, or maybe from her mother’s hospital clothes. As the child’s fever climbed Martha stayed at home to look after her. She would send Lenina to the chemist for mustard plasters to ease her sister’s coughing, and eye drops for her swollen eyes.

On the third or fourth night of Lyudmila’s fever there was a sharp knock on the door. Feodosia went to open it. Several men in dark uniforms with pistols on their belts pushed inside the house. They demanded to see ‘Citizen Bibikova’. Martha, Lyudmila in her arms, scrambled to her feet as they opened the kitchen door.

‘Get up!’ one of the men ordered Lenina, and threw open the trunk she had been sleeping on, spilling her and the blankets on to the floor. Martha began to scream in protest, grabbing the officer by the arm. He pushed her backwards, toppling her into the open trunk with her three-year-old daughter in her arms. Lenina remembers the screaming, everyone screaming, her mother struggling to get up from the trunk, a moment of grotesque farce within the unfolding nightmare. The NKVD men pulled Martha out, held her arms behind her back and bundled her out of the house and into the garden, still in her nightdress. On the street they pushed her into one of two police cars ‘ Black Crows’ – waiting for them. Another officer followed with the two children, Lyudmila under his arm and leading Lenina by the hand. As they reached the street, Lenina struggled free from the grip of the man who held her and tried to run to her mother; she was caught and bundled with her sister into the second car. As they drove away Lenina clutched her feverish little sister, who was crying hysterically. At the end of the street the two cars turned in different directions. The girls were not to see their mother again for eleven years.

My own son, Nikita, is, as I write this, exactly Lyudmila’s age when Martha was arrested – two months shy of four years old. He has a round face and a mop of dark hair, and his grandmother Lyudmila’s striking blue eyes. Lenina, when we went to visit a few weeks ago, hugged him so tight that he cried; she said he looked so like Lyudmila she couldn’t bear it. ‘I became a mother at twelve, when they took Mother away,’ she said. ‘Lyudmila was my first child. He’s a little Lyudmila.’

Sometimes, as I watch Nikita play, I feel-like most parents, I suppose – a flash of obscure, irrational fear. As he potters in the flowerbeds rooting for snails or digging up bulbs, absorbed in his own thoughts, I fear that my child could die, or be somehow taken from me. At other times, usually when it’s late at night and I’m drunk and far from home, on assignment in Baghdad or another of the Godforsaken hell-holes where I’ve spent much of my life since leaving Moscow, I imagine what will happen to him if I die. I wonder if he’ll manage, what he’ll remember of me, if he’ll understand, if he’ll cry. The thought of losing him is so horrifying it makes me giddy. I often think of Martha on that night and try to imagine how I would feel if it were Nikita snatched away from my arms by strangers. But I cannot picture it.

The NKVD men drove Lenina and Lyudmila to the Simferopol Prison for Underage Offenders, where they were to remain until the state determined their fate. By the grim logic of the Purge, the family members of an ‘enemy of the people’ were deemed to have been contaminated by his or her heresy, as if it were a disease. As the old Russian saying goes, ‘the apple does not fall far from the apple tree’. Therefore these two children, aged twelve and three, were doomed to suffer for their father’s sin. Like him, they were ordained by the Party to become the dross of history.

The prison was badly lit, and stank of urine, carbolic soap and coal-tar ointment. Lenina remembers the faces of the men who took down their details, the acrid smell of the crowded cell to which they were taken and told to find a space for themselves on the straw-covered floor, and the barking of the guard dogs in the corridor. Holding her moaning little sister, she cried herself to sleep.

Mila also remembers the night of her mother’s arrest. It is her earliest clear memory. She is standing in her nightshirt holding a doll, a soldier pushes her, and everyone screams. Of her brief three years and ten months of normal family life she has no recollection, except for a ghost of a memory of being carried on her father’s shoulders. From that moment on, Lenina became her little sister’s surrogate mother. Two frightened children alone in a world that had suddenly become dark and incomprehensible.