Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

5. Prison

On a warm, foggy morning on Novoslobodskaya Street in the summer of 1995, I showed up at the gate of Butirskaya Prison, my reporter’s notebook in my back pocket. The entrance was squeezed between a hairdresser’s salon and a shop; I thought I had come to the wrong place. But through a dingy corridor between the drab Soviet buildings which lined the street, there lay a strange, closed world. Butirskaya was a vast fortress – literally a fortress, with towers, crenellations and a flock of crows wheeling around the rooftops, built by Catherine the Great for her adopted country’s numerous criminals, including the peasant rebel Emeliyan Pugachev.

Outside on the street, the dusty heat of a Moscow summer was already building. But as we were led through a small, arched gateway the June heat immediately soured into a clammy pall which settled on my skin and clothes like someone else’s sweat. Even in the administrative wing, the metallic smell of sour cabbage, cheap detergent and damp clothes was all-pervasive.

The cell I visited was about sixty feet by fifteen. A wave of male stink, rancid sweat mixed with urine, welled out as the guard opened the door. At first I thought that the prisoners were crowding towards the door to see who had come. Then, as I peered down the room, I saw that they were packed that tightly from the door to the heavy, shuttered window just visible at the far end. The cell was like a crowded Metro carriage. Two rows of wooden shelves covered in bedding and bodies ran along each wall. Rows of bunioned feet protruded from both tiers. In the space left in the middle stood a throng of men, naked except for their underwear, leaning against the bunks or perching on the ends of the beds. Some were playing cards, most of the reclining men slept, and the rest just stood, unable to move. Wet washing hung from makeshift clothes lines strung across the ceiling. A tiny, overflowing toilet and a single tap stood in the corner. The heat and humidity were so intense that it was hard to inhale, and the overpowering smell of concentrated human beings made me retch.

I pushed my way down the cell, as the guard watched from the door. It was an unwritten rule, he said later, that warders never went into the cells unless someone went berzerk, or there was a stabbing.

There were 142 men in the cell. They had empty, sunken eyes. Their legs and bodies were covered in flea bites and sores. About half had hacking, tubercular coughs, and spat copiously on the greasy floor. There was no natural light, the window was shuttered, with only two tiny sections opened to let in fresh air. The place was lit with four dim bulbs which shone sixteen hours a day.

I tried to talk to a couple of them, briefly, but it was so uncomfortable speaking to a stranger in such unnatural proximity, chest to chest, I found I had nothing to say. Neither then, nor later, could I humanize the prisoners or relate to them as people. They had passed into another reality; they had been transformed into something less than human, closer to a herd of animals. Even when they got out, I imagined, it would forever be a part of them. Whereas I, even as I squeezed among them, was merely on the outside, looking in. I could no more identify with them than I could with the mangy animals at Moscow’s sad old Zoo. Never, before or since as a reporter in Russia, did I feel more intensely that I was Just Visiting.

Their faces were the faces of men whose whole lives had imploded into the space of a few feet of the fetid room they inhabited. They stared at me as I pushed past from a distance of six inches, but when I looked into their eyes I knew they were looking at me from a distance I could never, ever cross.

There is a photograph of Lyudmila and Lenina taken some time in early 1938. Lenina is wearing a headscarf to cover her shaven head, Lyudmila is clutching a homemade rag doll with pigtails and a white cotton dress and hat. Lenina is a beautiful girl, with big eyes, a broad forehead, a delicate mouth. Lyudmila, also shaven-headed and wearing a knitted waistcoat and white collarless shirt, looks like a round-faced boy as she leans her head against her sister’s breast. Lenina’s halfsmile is wistful, and disconcertingly adult. Both sisters look haunted and serious. Their eyes are not children’s eyes. The photograph stands on my desk. Despite its familiarity, I cannot look at that image without a pang of emotion.

At dawn on their first day in prison Lenina and Lyudmila’s cellmates questioned Lenina on why they were in jail. They were all young girls, mostly thieves and prostitutes. On hearing that the newcomers weren’t criminals, just ‘politicals’, as the children of enemies of the people were called, they pinched Lenina viciously and laughed at her sobbing. Two guards, one holding a barking Alsatian, opened the cell door and ordered silence. The girls were herded into a refectory, where they lined up at a small window for a bowl of soup. One of the older girls slapped the underside of Lenina’s bowl as she came away from the window, spilling her soup on the floor, an initiation rite for the new kids. Lenina went back to the cell hungry. A few hours later a prison doctor came, diagnosed Lyudmila with measles and sent her immediately to the prison hospital, leaving Lenina alone with her tormentors.

After a few days Lenina was allowed to visit her sister during the daily exercise hour. She would save whatever scraps of meat or sugar lumps she could after the older girls had picked through her food, hide them in her underpants and give them to Lyudmila to keep up her strength. Sometimes their aunt Feodosia would come by with little packets of food, which Lenina would pull up on a string through the barred hospital window overlooking the street. Mila remembers the string and the little parcels of food. She also remembers being scolded for wetting the bed at night, and her sister Lenina crying all the time.

In late December, three weeks after they had been imprisoned, Lenina awoke in the middle of the night to find the cell filling with smoke. The cell door opened, and a panicking warder ordered the children out into the yard. The building had been set on fire by some older children to cover an escape attempt. The guards had let the dogs loose and they snapped at the children as they were ushered into the exercise yard. Ever since that night, Lenina has been terrified of dogs. The children shivered in the cold as the fire engines arrived. Lyudmila had also been brought out, lying on a stretcher, with other children evacuated from the prison hospital.

The prison burned all night. By dawn it was gutted and useless, and the children were frozen half to death in the yard, still under guard. A convoy of open trucks arrived to take them away in groups of twenty. Lenina and Lyudmila were on one of the last, bound for one of the more distant orphanages in the region. Their truck rode them north for most of the day, hungry and freezing cold, through driving sleet. Finally, they were unloaded at an ‘allocation centre’ for parentless children in Dnepropetrovsk. Lenina and Lyudmila were blue with cold and shivering so uncontrollably that Lenina remembers that she couldn’t speak. They were herded into a large hall, already filled with the children of Spanish Republicans, evacuated to the Soviet Union to save them from the civil war. The Spanish children, far from home, were bawling and terrified as they waited to be assigned to local orphanages.

A harassed desk officer took the list of names and ages from the new arrivals’ escort. He told Lyudmila to go with the other little children, and Lenina to stand aside and wait her turn. Lenina fell on her knees, pleading for the men not to take her sister away, embracing the pigskin boots of the guards. As she pleaded, a man in civilian clothes listened, leaning on the doorframe; as she told the story sixty-five years later in the kitchen of her apartment in Moscow, Lenina lumbered up and leaned by the kitchen door, arms crossed, to demonstrate. The man stepped forward, put his hand gently on the shoulder of the guard, said, ‘I’ll take her,’ leaned down and helped Lenina up off the floor.

The man was Yakov Abramovich Michnik, the director of a giant newly built children’s home at Verkhne-Dneprovsk, created to rehabilitate 1,600 street children, criminals and orphans and make then into new Soviet men and women. That evening Lyudmila and the youngest children, plus twelve-year-old Lenina, were driven to his orphanage in a bus. When they arrived, the children were showered and deloused, and their heads were shaved. They were assigned to dormitories according to age. Lenina was given a cot beside her sister’s bed in the hospital dormitory, down the corridor from the others. The nurses and supervisors confiscated the Spanish children’s shoes and dolls and took them for their own children. Lenina still dreams about the way the Spanish kids cried without their beloved toys, their last physical reminder of home. All night, they cried out ‘Mamá’.

As the shock of their arrest and imprisonment faded, Verkhne-Dneprovsk turned out to be a relatively happy place. They had food, and the teachers were kind. In her first days at the orphanage, Lyudmila tried to cool her burning fever by burying her legs in damp sand in a sandpit, Within weeks, her measles were cured, but it was discovered that she had caught tuberculosis of the bones, which spread rapidly due to her weakened immune system.

Lenina came to see her little sister at the local hospital’s infection ward every day after school. Lyudmila would stand on a chair and lean out of the window and wave and talk. One day when Lenina came to visit, she found Lyudmila red-eyed and silent. Her little Spanish friend Juan, ‘Juanchik’, who slept in the bed next to her had been taken away in the night, and no one would tell her where he had gone. The nurse told Lenina that Juan had died of tuberculosis. One by one, every one of the eighteen children who had been in the ward when Lyudmila was admitted died. My mother was the only child to survive.

Lenina couldn’t write to her relatives in Moscow because she couldn’t remember their address; even if she had, there was little chance that they would risk saving the children of an enemy of the people. She did write to their aunt Feodosia in Simferopol, but she didn’t come for them. Feodosia did, however, send news of her sister Martha. She had been sent to a place called Kazakhstan, Feodosia explained to her young niece, to a prison camp called KarLag. Her address was a post box number. Lenina would walk three miles each day from the orphanage to the local school, and in her free time scrubbed floors for her teachers in exchange for onions, small pieces of smoked pig-fat, sugar and apples. She would take the sugar and apples to Lyudmila in the hospital, but she saved the onions. When Lenina had collected ten onions, she made them into a small parcel. She addressed the brown paper package carefully to the numbered post box in Kazakhstan, did more chores to pay for the stamps, and posted it from the orphanage. Months later, she got a letter back from Martha. She thanked her daughter for the parcel, but told her she was a ‘fool’ not to have wrapped the onions individually in paper. As it was, they had arrived frozen and spoiled, Martha complained. Nevertheless, she asked after Lyudmila and wished her daughters well. She promised to be back to collect them soon. It was the last Lenina was to hear from her mother until after the war.

My mother doesn’t remember having any toys as a child, apart from a teddy bear she’d brought from Chernigov, which she lost in the children’s prison. The doll in the photograph taken at Verkhne-Dneprovsk was a photographer’s prop. Lenina remembers Lyudmila crying when she was told she couldn’t keep it after the picture was taken.

Lyudmila had a passion for drawing, but never, as she put it, ‘had any talent’. Despite her illness, she learned to read very early and soon was passing the long, lonely days in hospital reading books from the orphanage library. Books, and the wonderful worlds the words contained, took the place of friends. It was during the many months of enforced idleness in hospital which punctuated her childhood that she learned to live a fantasy life, constructed in her own lively mind. The mysterious, brooding forests of Pushkin’s stories, the magic carpet rides above the sleeping houses of Baghdad in the Arabian Nights, the fabulous monsters encountered by Sinbad the Sailor, and the high-stepping horsemen and witches of ancient Russia illustrated by Ivan Bilibin – these were the places to which she would escape in her childhood imagination. The harsh, antiseptic, loveless world around her became more tolerable in the knowledge that somewhere, far away, was a better place to which she would eventually travel. Even when she grew into a woman and her crippled legs had finally healed, this powerful vision of another, magical life – and the sense that that life could be won by endurance and pure force of will was never to leave her.

At the orphanage Lenina had a dream. She was wearing her white blouse and red Young Pioneer tie. Some children called out to her, ‘Your father! They’re bringing out your father!’ She ran outside and saw her father from behind, being led by three men with rifles. They took him to the steep bank of the great Dniepr River, at the edge of the orphanage’s grounds. He stood on the edge for a long time, as Lenina looked on, frozen in the paralysis of the dream. Then the three men fired their rifles into her father, silently. He fell, bouncing down the bank. It was the only time Lenina ever dreamt of her father.

By the end of 1938 Lyudmila had recovered sufficiently to go to kindergarten, but was in and out of hospital for a series of crude operations to cut away more and more tissue. The bones of her right leg had been rotted by the tuberculosis and she walked with a heavy limp. Nevertheless she was a cheerful and intelligent child, devoted to her sister. The orphanage was the only world she could remember, and she attained a kind of happiness there.

It was harder for Lenina, for her former life began to haunt her. She had been told by her teachers that her parents were ‘enemies of the people’, and were being punished. She should try to forget them. Uncle Stalin, whose portrait hung in the classroom, was looking after them now. Lenina chanted along with the other children, ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.’ But she still never doubted that she would see her beloved father again. When the teachers talked about the ‘bright future’, Lenina pictured being reunited with her father.

The steppes of the eastern Ukraine were flat and featureless, a land of giant skies as big as the whole world. In summer, Lenina would often go down to the Dniepr with the other children to bathe in the wide, slow-moving river, sliding on its muddy banks as they scrambled into the water. The stern rhythms of orphanage life left Lenina little room for reflection. And among hundreds of parentless children like themselves, the Bibikov sisters were more fortunate than most. They at least had each other.

But the peace the sisters found at Verkhne-Dneprovsk was soon shattered in its turn.

In the summer of 1941, Lenina was sixteen and Lyudmila seven. Lyudmila was looking forward to starting her first year of school, and Lenina was a senior member of the Young Pioneers, proud to wear the smart, starched uniform. Most mornings there was a parade, the various school classes dragooned into neat rows, with two older children acting as honour guards as the Soviet flag was run up the flagpole to a scratchy recording of the Soviet national anthem. Lenina and the older children sometimes sat reverently in front of a large Bakelite radio, listening to improving speeches and homilies on the children’s programme of Soviet State Radio. Later, in private, the adults listened to the evening news of the war that Germany had unleashed on France and Britain. But the conflict seemed a distant thing, the death throes of the decadent capitalist world as it turned in upon itself. The Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact two years before. The war concerned other people, far from the Dniepr plains.

It was a scorching summer. The steppe wind blew in clouds of dust from the dry fields, covering the orphanage buildings and the trees in the playground with a fine brown pall. For the children, life continued as normal during those baking days, as the German Army massed on the Soviet-Polish border.

Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler launched the blitzkrieg assault codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which quickly crushed Soviet resistance. Unbeknown to the sisters, their uncle Isaac, the engineer now turned pilot, was shot down and killed over Belarus in the first days of the war at the controls of his Polikarpov fighter, outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the swarms of Messerschmitt fighters who cleared the skies ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht. His family never found out where, or even if, he was buried.

Lenina and Lyudmila only heard the news of the attack days later from their solemn teachers, who had in turn heard it on the radio, which announced that the Red Army was heroically repulsing the invaders. It wasn’t true. Within ten days, Minsk had fallen. By 27 June, two German armies had advanced 200 miles into Soviet territory, a third of the way to Moscow. By 21 August the Werhmacht had cut the Moscow-Leningrad railway line and German Panzer divisions were advancing fast across the wheat fields of the Ukraine, pushing towards Stalingrad and the Caucasus oilfields.

Kiev fell on 26 September. Days later, the sound of distant guns could be heard at Verkhne-Dneprovsk, carried eastwards on the wind. Lenina was at school when the trucks came to mobilize the older orphanage children to dig trenches. They were told to leave their books and load up as quickly as they could. Lenina thought that they would be back soon, even in time for supper. Her sister, at school with the junior class, didn’t see her leave.

Lenina never returned to Verkhne-Dneprovsk. Her detachment of child trench-diggers was driven to the outskirts of the city, where they spent days shovelling the black earth on to the four-handled trays Russians use in place of wheelbarrows. Within days they began to fall back eastwards as the Germans advanced. They slept when they could, on sacks on the floors of hastily evacuated factories, or on the soft freshly dug earth. They would dig during the day and walk at night, moving back daily before the German offensive. There was no way to return to the orphanage, or to find news of Lyudmila or the other children they had left behind.

Lyudmila herself remembers very little of what happened next. Her recollection of that time seems as opaque as Lenina’s is clear. Lenina only heard the story after the war from one of her classmates who had stayed behind to do chores the day the older children were taken to dig, and again from Yakov Michnik, the director of the children’s home, who came to be a friend and benefactor.

As the front line approached Verkhne-Dneprovsk in the first days of October, the children left at the orphanage and at the hospital were stranded. All available transport had been mobilized, and as the bombing grew closer the last remaining staff decided to evacuate the infants by the only route still open to them – via the great steppe river which ran by the end of the orphanage’s territory. The orphanage director commandeered two large river rafts, designed to be hauled up river by horses, from a local collective farm. He loaded the forty remaining children on board. Then, as dusk fell and an artillery barrage flashed in the sky, the six remaining staff pushed the barges full of children out into the stream, propelling the rafts with poles until the current caught them and carried them away into the darkness.