Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

7. Mila

Mila quickly put on weight, though her body was still deformed by tuberculosis. She spent six months at the Danilovsky Monastery, avidly reading big coloured American children’s comic books. She was ten years old. She had survived.

In the spring of 1945 she was transferred to a special home for sick children at Malakhovka, a short ride on the electrichka suburban railway from Moscow, where she began her recovery in earnest. Her belly was still distended from starvation ‘ it stuck out further than her nose,’ Lenina remembers – and her left leg was withered. But she was unfailingly cheerful, singing songs in the yard and playing hopscotch with the other children. Mila would volunteer for the food checking rota, in which children stood in the kitchens and watched the cooks open up the big tins of American corned beef to make sure that every gram of it went into their soup. Despite the wonderful American food, she was never to lose the psychological scars of starvation. ‘Childhood hunger stays with you your whole life,’ she told me. ‘You can never ever feel truly full again.’

All in all, among a generation which had survived the famines, the Purges and the war, Lenina and Lyudmila could count themselves among the lucky. They had their lives, and each other. All around them were those who had lost much more. Perhaps that is why the sisters were not torn apart by experiences so traumatic that it seems, to us, almost inconceivable to have survived. Mila had lived when the Spanish children with her had died; Lenina found her sister by pure chance when thousands of children never did. That was already plenty to be grateful for.

Also, undoubtedly, Lenina and Lyudmila’s survival had something to do with the natural resilience of children, their ability to live in the moment. Blind to the wider world, they lived their lives in terms of the here and now, which is perhaps the most powerful weapon there is against despair. And, for Mila at least, there was the great, shielding ignorance of the past she had lost, buried in the hazy half-memories of childhood which made the reality of prison and orphanage a given, something to be endured but at least not regretted, or understood. She had been scarred, physically and mentally, but not broken. The Hershey’s chocolate and corned beef healed her body, and her spirit was intact, and ready to take on the world.

Soon after Lyudmila’s return from Solikamsk, a young tank captain named Alexander Vasin paid a visit to the Bibikov apartment on Taganskaya Square. Yakov’s wife Varvara was his aunt. Lenina was there, and shyly greeted her distant cousin. Alexander – Sasha – was healthy and handsome, with a winning smile and a loud laugh. He looked splendid in his olive-green uniform, with breeches and soft officers’ boots, epaulettes and crew-cut blond hair.

Lenina and Sasha had met briefly in 1937 during Lenina’s first visit to Moscow, just after her father’s arrest. Sasha joked how pretty his young cousin had become. Sasha offered to see her to the Metro as she left for work. Half jokingly, he flirted and tickled her on the Metro escalator, saying that he would like to marry her. They met again a few days later, on their first date, in Krasnopresnensky Park, near the Zoo. He took her to a café in the park, the first time in her life Lenina had ever been to a restaurant of any sort. Thirty-six years later, after Sasha’s death of a heart attack, his colleagues arranged his wake, by coincidence, in the same restaurant.

After two weeks of courtship, Sasha had to go back to his unit. He proposed marriage to Lenina before he left, and she accepted.

Three days after he had left Moscow, as Sasha’s car neared the front line west of Smolensk, it hit an anti-tank mine. His leg was shredded and had to be amputated at the knee with a wood saw. He was flown to one of the giant military hospitals in Ivanovo to recover. From there, Sasha wrote Lenina a strange letter. He told his fiancée that he had been in a fire and was burned and disfigured, and that she should find someone else to marry. When she got the letter Lenina ran to her uncle. Yakov, pulling strings, arranged a seat for Lenina on an American Douglas transport plane to Ivanovo, and instructed the crew to prepare to bring a wounded man back with them to Moscow. Lenina found the hospital and as she ran up the steps she saw Sasha standing in his underwear on crutches in the hospital yard, not burned but missing a leg. Lenina brought him back to Moscow and they were married three months later. She was nineteen, he was twenty-six. Strangely, after a marriage that lasted nearly four decades, Lenina cannot now remember which leg he had lost.

I remember Sasha as an overwhelmingly masculine presence, strong-jawed and decisive, with an explosive laugh and a manner which brooked no nonsense. He was in many ways a perfect Soviet man, bluff and cheerful, always seeing the good even when confronted, as every Soviet citizen constantly was, with incompetence and ugliness.

In many ways, I think, he was the opposite of his young sister-in-law Lyudmila, She was ambitious and uncompromising, always seeking to shape the world around her. He was content with simple pleasures: the respect of his friends and colleagues, his small apartment, the dacha which he built with his own hands from scrounged planks and bricks. He also knew the power of his good looks. It was as though Sasha felt that his virility was a gift which it was his duty to share among a generation of women where men were in short supply. But he never gave Lenina, who was terribly jealous, any reason to suspect infidelity. ‘Maybe he was unfaithful,’ she used to say of him in approval. ‘But he made sure I never, ever, knew a thing.’

Moscow in the closing months of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was a city close to exhaustion. Far to the west, the Red Army fought through eastern Prussia to beat the Western Allies to Berlin. But back home, the women and children waged a more banal war against hunger and cold among the ruins of a country wrecked by the war effort. They worried about their men at the front, their fear of terrible news made all the more poignant by the imminent certainty of victory.

The streets were filled with men in uniform, the evenings were dark because street lighting was, like everything else, rationed. Life was suspended pending the war’s end, everyone concentrating on survival, not daring to think of the future. Daily existence revolved around little cardboard ration cards and rumours. Varvara and her daughter stood for hours in queues at street corners on the promise of an imminent delivery of food; Lenina scrounged milk from maternity hospitals to take to her always-ravenous little sister Lyudmila. In the evenings Lenina and Sasha sat by their big radio listening to the announcer reeling off strings of Soviet victories in places with German-sounding names, and felt righteous and pleased.

Lenina was selfishly happy that her Sasha was alive, unlike the sweethearts of so many of her girlfriends at the Khodinskoye airfield. The young couple were allocated a tiny apartment in the basement of a pre-revolutionary mansion on Herzen Street. It was cramped and the small windows were high in the wall, but it was Lenina’s first home since childhood, and she was determined to make it comfortable for her new little family.

The kitchen became Lenina’s kingdom, and food was the currency of her love. A lifetime after she began to cook for herself in the tiny stove on Herzen Street, I would sit in my aunt’s kitchen on Frunzenskaya Embankment, and she would feed me the same dishes she’d first learned to cook for Sasha sour cabbage soup, pea soup, beef cutlets and fried potatoes. As I ate, she’d watch me closely for signs of appreciation. For both Lenina and my mother, food and happiness were to be closely intertwined.

In January 1945, shortly before her eleventh birthday, Lyudmila was deemed to have recovered sufficiently to be discharged from the children’s home at Malakhovka. But there wasn’t space for her in Lenina’s one-room Herzen Street apartment. Lenina was already pregnant with her first child, and Sasha’s sister Tamara was sleeping on a folding bed in the kitchen. Lenina called her aunt Varvara, but she also refused to take in Lyudmila – ‘Another scrounger on the phone,’ she told her husband when he asked who was calling. So Sasha helped find Lyudmila a place in an orphanage at Saltykovka, twenty-five miles outside Moscow. Lyudmila took with her a single cardboard suitcase filled with American Red Cross clothes, some children’s books, and a doll.

Saltykovka is a pleasant, sleepy little place. My mother and I went to visit on a dusty summer afternoon in 1988. We took the elektrichka, as my mother had often done as a child, from Kursky Station. The platform at Saltykovka was a single strip of concrete, and after the train had clanked away down its narrow canyon cut through the birch forest the only sounds were of birds and the distant revving of an engine.

‘It hasn’t changed at all,’ my mother announced as we walked, arm in arm, along the single unpaved street which ran through the village. The wooden houses were ramshackle, painted green or dull yellow, and at the end of the street stood the grand orphanage gates. Picket fences, leaning at drunken angles, framed tiny allotments and the houses were halfhidden by outsize sunflowers and jasmine bushes running wild.

The old buildings of the orphanage where my mother had spent most of her childhood stood on the edge of the forest. The current generation of orphans was away at summer camp; the place was deserted. It had the melancholy feel of children’s institutions when the children are away, an air of regimented jollity, and the poignancy of children’s loneliness.

Yet Mila was happy at Saltykovka, as happy as anywhere else she could remember. She went to her first normal school, and loved it. Her years of enforced idleness in hospital beds had taught her to love books, and Lenina would bring her novels from Yakov’s library, which she read voraciously. The schoolmistresses were strict and dedicated, pedagogues of the old school, drilling their pupils in correct Russian grammar and the works of Pushkin. On Sundays, soldiers would come and take the children to a nearby cinema in big army trucks.

Mila remembers sitting for hours on the lap of the elderly peasant woman who stoked the bath-house furnace as she combed out the lice from the children’s hair. One of the teachers, Maria Nikolaevna Kharlamova, spent hours of her own time coaching my mother in Russian literature and history.

When my mother and I knocked on Maria Nikolaevna’s door she recognized my mother immediately, and burst into tears.

‘Milochkal Can it be you?’ she kept repeating as they embraced.

Maria Nikolaevna fussed over tea and home-made jam for us both, then as we sat at her kitchen table she hunted through piles of old papers to retrieve a little envelope of local newspaper clippings she had kept on Lyudmila – news of her admission to Moscow University, news of her prizewinning ‘Red Diploma’ on graduation.

‘I was so proud of you!’ Maria Nikolaevna whispered, staring across the rickety table at her star pupil with all the satisfaction of an elderly mother. ‘I was proud of all of you.’

Mila also spent months at a time away from Saltykovka, enduring painful operations on her leg and hip in the Botkin Hospital in central Moscow. The deformities wreaked by her childhood tuberculosis had left one leg sixteen centimetres shorter than the other, and when she was fifteen the Botkin surgeons had to break the bone and put weights on Lyudmila’s leg to make it grow longer.

When she was allowed back from the oppressive silence of the hospital wards to the clamour of Saltykovka, Mila threw herself into games and group activities. She was always a leader, a Young Pioneer ‘Activist’, a leader of the Communist version of the Scouts or Guides, with a special badge on her white shirt to show her status. ‘In place of arms, we have steel wings; In place of a heart, a fiery engine,’ went a stirring song of the time, and Mila, despite her disability, tried hard to live up to the ideal.

Mila was outspoken, too, and thoughtful. Both were dangerous habits, even in school. One day shortly after the end of the war, during an obligatory classroom reading of the editorial page of Pionerskaya Pravda (the children’s version of the great Party newspaper), the teacher recited the new anti- American rhetoric. Mila put up her hand in the approved Pioneer fashion – fingers pointing straight up to the ceiling, elbow on the desk – to ask a question.

‘But the Americans helped us a lot during the war, didn’t they?’ she asked.

The teacher was horrified and sent Mila immediately to the headmaster, who hastily convened a session of the druzina, a supposedly informal children’s court which was the junior equivalent of a Party meeting. Dutifully assembled, Mila’s classroom colleagues pronounced that she must be more attentive to political education, and formally censured her. It was not the only time she would face such a hypocrites’ court.

There was a burning will in that crippled little body, even then. Later, she wrote to her future husband, my father, of her refusal to compromise, to accept the realities of Soviet life. ‘I want life to show me in practice the strength of my principles,’ she wrote. ‘I want it, I want it, I want it.’ In a world where the most her contemporaries aspired to was to get by, to do the best they could with what they had, Mila believed that her will could conquer the world. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko called the anti-hero of his and Mila’s generation ‘Comrade Kompromis Kompromisovich’ in sardonic tribute to the men and women who negotiated their way through the hypocrisy and disappointments of Soviet life by a million small compromises. Mila was not one of them.

Despite her crippled leg, Mila became skipping champion of her class. At Saltykovka she organized class lice checks and hikes, singing sessions and games of hopscotch. When she visited her sister on Herzen Street she’d throw herself into the street’s hopscotch championships, chalking the boxes on the asphalt with the neighbours’ children. Lyudmila almost always emerged as the winner, even on one occasion when she had to compete with a broken arm in a plaster cast.

News of victory came sonorously over the radio on 9 May 1945. Lenina heard the radio announcement at the Dynamo factory. She remembers feeling infinite relief, and an overwhelming weariness. A few days later there was a parade of German prisoners down the Garden Ring road, and Lenina went to the top of Herzen Street to see the enemy at first hand. The crowds watched in silence. She noticed the strong smell of the leather of the German prisoners’ boots and webbing. They walked in good order, expressionless. The prisoners were followed ostentatiously by trucks spraying the street to wash away the contagion of the Fascist presence. Fewer than one in ten of the prisoners would ever return to their homeland.

Yakov moved his family into a larger, more stylish apartment. He had acquired a trophy Mercedes looted from Germany on a trip otherwise devoted to dismantling German rocketry laboratories and shipping them back wholesale to the Lavochkin Construction Bureau in Moscow. The Mercedes was a huge black shining beast, the mark of giddying rank. Yakov would drive around Moscow giving lifts to young girls in his car, a pastime which Varvara eventually discovered and which threw her into violent frenzies of jealousy. Yakov’s new job as head of the Soviet Union’s fledgling rocket programme, staffed by captured German scientists, opened a world of privilege to his family, which they were in no hurry to share with their poor relatives. For Lenina and Lyudmila, the drabness of wartime austerity continued for years after the end of the war. But there were plenty of bright parades full of gaudy paper slogans and banners, and a great sense of pride and achievement. Whenever Lenina and Sasha, medals arrayed on his chest, would walk with their new baby Nadia it seemed that she had, at last, escaped the wreckage of her childhood.

Boris Bibikov was due to be released from prison in June 1947, according to his official sentence of ‘ten years without the right of correspondence’. Despite the slim chance that he could have survived the camps and the war, Lenina continued to hope that he would return.

Even after what they had been through, the Bibikov family retained a naïve faith in the essential probity and rightness of the Soviet system. Like tens of millions of other relatives of the victims of the Purges, they believed that their loved one had suffered an injustice which was exceptional. Boris’s mother Sophia wrote letters to the Interior Ministry asking for news of her son in the unshakeable belief that justice would eventually prevail. For years she received no answer, yet the faith remained. But Boris’s release date came and went with no news.

In the winter of 1948, Lenina, pregnant with her second child, went to stay for a few months with Sasha’s mother Praskovia in a village twenty miles from Kaluga, in central Russia where fresh milk was plentiful and where the village women could look after young Nadia as Lenina waited for the new arrival. Sasha was studying law in Moscow; every Saturday night he’d take the train to Kaluga with a battered bicycle he’d repaired himself, cycle (with one leg) to the village, spend the day with his family, and cycle back in the evening to catch the Moscow train.

One day Sasha brought a letter postmarked KarLag. It had no envelope; instead it was folded into a triangle and tucked into itself, in the manner of the time. It was from Martha. She wrote that she had been released from prison the previous spring and was living close to the camp under ‘administrative detention’. She had a newborn baby boy called Viktor. The child’s father was a priest, she said, whose life she’d saved in the camp. But he’d been released and gone back to his own family in the Siberian region of the Altai.

Now, Martha said, she expected to receive permission to leave Kazakhstan soon, but wondered where she could go since she had no passport. Though she didn’t spell it out, Lenina knew what her mother meant – her travel documents marked her as a political prisoner, she was not allowed to live closer than 101 kilometres to a major city. There was precious little room for her in Lenina’s tiny apartment in Moscow, but Sasha’s mother Praskovia insisted: Lenina must do everything she could to get Martha to Moscow. Lenina wrote a letter telling her mother to disregard the 101 kilometres and come to live with them in the capital as soon as she was able. Sasha posted the letter from Moscow the next day.

The locomotive pulled slowly into Kursky Station belching soot and steam. Because of a shortage of rolling stock the train was made up of cattle wagons instead of carriages. Martha hadn’t been allowed to buy a ticket on the normal train from Semipalatinsk because of her lack of papers, so she came on an unscheduled train full of passport-less human driftwood like herself, sending a brief telegram to her daughter as she embarked warning of her arrival. The train disgorged streams of bedraggled travellers, most of them ex-convicts, exhausted and stinking after their five-day journey.

Lenina’s abiding memory of her mother was as a fashionable Party housewife. Now, as she staggered down the platform, Martha looked like a beggar woman. She was filthy and lousy and wore a convict’s black padded jacket. She had no luggage except for a dirty bundle of clothes. She was alone.

Martha barely smiled as she saw her daughter, heavily pregnant with her second child, waddling towards her. They embraced, and wept. Lenina asked what had happened to her mother’s new baby. ‘Eh, it died,’ Martha said, dismissively, and pushed off into the crowd heading towards the exit. They rode the Metro in silence to Barrikadnaya Street, where Lenina took her mother straight to a public bathhouse near the Zoo to get her cleaned up and de-loused.

At home that evening in the basement apartment on Herzen Street with Lenina, Sasha and their daughter Nadia, Martha seemed to recede into a kind of stupefied shock. She complained that the bed they had made for her was too soft and that her granddaughter was crying too loudly. By the end of the evening, Lenina was in tears, being comforted by Sasha as his mother-in-law paced, sleepless, in the kitchen.

The next day Lenina took the elektrichka to Saltykovka to fetch Lyudmila, When the two girls arrived at Herzen Street, Martha was waiting impatiently by the apartment door. The apartment was at the end of a long corridor, and the first glimpse Martha had of her younger daughter was a crippled silhouette at the end of the hall. Martha called out Lyudmila’s name, and howled as the little girl ran lopsidedly towards her. Lyudmila remembered that awful wail all her life – the wail of a woman who had last seen her daughter as a plump, happy toddler and then lost her for eleven years, only to find her again as a hobbling, emaciated fourteen-year-old.

Martha held her for a long time, weeping. Mila, when she recalls the meeting now, shakes her head as she searches for any trace of the emotions she felt at the time. But she felt nothing. ‘I probably hugged her. I probably said “mother”. But I can’t remember.’

For Mila, the word ‘mother’ had become little more than an abstraction. It had no place in the world of orphans in which she had spent her childhood. She had no memory at all of her parents, except for the one image of the night of her mother’s arrest and the ghost of a memory of her father. She had written a dutiful letter to her mother in Karlager as soon as Lenina had told her that their mother was alive and well. But the assurances of devotion in the letter were, in truth, just an invention. Mila really had no idea, except from books, what a real mother was like, or how one should feel about her.

When she left in the late afternoon to return to Saltykovka, Lyudmila’s overwhelming emotion was gratitude for the large meal Martha had cooked for them. Years later, she wrote to her fiancé that she had wept when she first heard that her mother was alive, but had ruthlessly suppressed her tears as a sign of weakness.

Martha never became a real mother to Lyudmila, The bond broken in December 1937 would not be re-formed. Mila often came to Lenina’s apartment, but quickly found she couldn’t bear Martha’s brooding manner and flashes of anger. Within months of Martha’s return to Moscow, they slipped into a dutiful rhythm. Most weekends, Martha and Lenina would come out to Saltykovka. Lenina would collect her sister from the orphanage for a walk; Martha, still officially a nonperson, would wait by the village pond for her daughters. They’d walk and talk, and Martha would hand over the sweets and biscuits she’d bought or made, which Mila would share with the other children.

Lyudmila loved her mother ‘like a dog loves the person who feeds it,’ she told me on a hot summer night at my home in Istanbul. ‘I understood the Party, Stalin, the People. But I never knew what the word “mother” meant.’

Though her mother was alive, Mila remained, in her heart, an orphan. But long before Lyudmila became a mother herself, she was obsessed with the idea of motherhood, and what kind of mother she would be herself. She would often write to my future father about their unborn children, and the awful fear she had of losing her children as Martha had lost hers.

‘All night I dreamt I was carrying a small boy in my arms, our son,’ Mila wrote to my father in 1964. ‘He was very gentle and affectionate. But the road was very difficult and long, it went up and down and into underground labyrinths. Carrying him was very hard but I couldn’t leave behind such a wonderful being in whom everything was yours, even his voice, nose, hair, fingers. For some reason we came to the old Moscow State University building on Mokhovaya Street and an old man was choosing the best children out of a crowd and my boy was one of them. Everyone was happy that their children were being chosen, but I was crying bitterly because I didn’t believe they would return him to me.’

Mila was filled with the need to protect her own children, even before we were born. But her mother Martha seemed, at times, consumed with an irrational hatred of hers. There were moments when, irritated by something Mila had done or said, Martha snapped at her that she was an ‘orphanage cripple’. Hysterical, she would call her elder daughter ‘Jew-spawn’ and swear in the most filthy prison language she could summon. At other times she lapsed into hysterical displays of self-pity and affection, clutching at her children in a torrent of tears.

Martha had gone mad in the camps. That much seems obvious from her behaviour after her return from Kazakhstan. But such was the general fear and ignorance of psychiatry then that no one thought that she needed treatment, and the family suffered her self-hating craziness in silence. ‘Psychiatrists were worse than the NKVD to us,’ Lenina says. Martha always had a vicious streak. Life in the camps had turned her rage at the world into an uncontrollable force.

Martha, who had been rejected by her father and abandoned her sister, in her turn rejected her own daughters. It was as though she believed that by meting out hatred and extinguishing love and hope in those around her she could somehow revenge herself on the world which had treated her so cruelly. She seemed to be driven by some inner perversity to create a world of spite around herself.

Yet at the same time she was capable of acts of great generosity, her old, better self fighting through all the bitterness. When I was born, in 1971, Martha wrote to congratulate Mila, and told her that she’d opened a bank account for me, and was earning money by cooking lunches for her local parish priest which she’d faithfully deposit in the account. When she came to visit us in 1976, she brought the deposit book to show Lyudmila, It was a kind of peace offering, a way of atoning for her daughter’s own loveless childhood. When Martha died Lenina couldn’t find the deposit book. She suspected Martha’s Ukrainian relatives of stealing it. But I think of Martha standing, day after day, by a stove cooking cutlets and soup, thinking of the child in London she had met for only a few weeks, and then lumbering down to the post office to deposit her kopecks for her grandson.

Lyudmila was spared the worst of her mother’s demons, seeing her only at weekends. Lenina was less lucky. She earned a few extra rubles by donating her copious breast milk to a hospital for abandoned infants on the other side of Herzen Street, and she managed to get Martha a job as a cook at the hospital, which kept her out of the house for most of the day. But at night she would sit in the kitchen and mutter evilly at her daughter. Martha would ask Lenina sarcastically why she had married ‘a cripple instead of a general’ and try to persuade Sasha and Lenina to leave each other. She flirted openly with Sasha, provoking furious fights with her daughter. Several times Martha attacked Lenina with a knife; once, Lenina broke her mother’s finger trying to restrain her after a hysterical battle which left half of Lenina’s prized crockery smashed. At night Martha would weep and curse Boris as a ‘treacherous fool’ for having brought down such misery on her, saying she never wanted to see him again and hoped he was dead.

‘We tolerated it all,’ remembers Lenina. ‘But how much blood she drankl She lived off our suffering.’

It took months for the story of how Martha had spent the previous decade to emerge, and even then the stories were spat out, accompanied by cynical comments. Martha had been convicted within weeks of her arrest. She seems to have had some kind of nervous breakdown under interrogation, and confessed to whatever she was told, including to her husband’s guilt. She was given ten years’ hard labour for being an ‘accessory to anti-Soviet activity’. Martha and several hundred other women prisoners were put on cattle trucks and sent to a remote railhead in Kazakhstan. There, they were marched across the steppe to Semipalatinsk, a primitive camp of tents, and put to work building their own prison from rough timber and barbed wire.

A friend of my wife’s family, the son of a Gulag prisoner, once told me about how his father had survived in the camps. Forget your past life as though it was a dream, the old man had said, give up hope about getting back, empty your mind of anger and regret and dissolve in the present, appreciate the joys of camp life, a hot stove, soap at the banya, the watery Siberian winter dawns and the silence of the forest, the discovery of a clump of cranberries in the taiga, a small kindness of one’s cellmate. But it took a strong personality, maybe even superhuman strength, to actually live like that, and most men and women who faced the test were destroyed by it.

Martha almost never spoke of her life in the camp. She told Lenina only one story, one so cruel and grotesque that she had little desire to hear any more. One autumn, before the war, the camp’s cows were calving. After every calf was born, Martha had to gather up the steaming placenta and caul in a bucket and throw them in a barrel outside, and cover them with carbolic acid to prevent the rats from eating them. Martha went inside to attend another calving, and when she came out she found two men, little more than skeletons, writhing in agony by the refuse barrel. They were newly arrived convicts from another camp, all former priests, now more dead than alive. They had crawled to the cowshed to eat the raw placentas. Martha pulled one of the men into the shed and fed him fresh milk to counteract the carbolic acid. He survived. The other died where he lay. Later, after they were both released, Martha lived with the man she had saved; he was the father of the child who died before Martha returned to Moscow.

After the final calving that night Martha had to help collect the bodies of the convicts who had died on arrival. She and another woman loaded them on to a cart, which Martha then drove alone into the steppe to the camp’s remote burial ground. Martha told Lenina that steppe jackals got wind of the dead meat in the wagon and chased her. To save herself, Martha told her daughter, she had thrown one of the bodies to the wild dogs.

Martha finished her sentence in early 1948, but was not allowed to return home. First she was released into ‘administrative detention’, which meant that she was forced to stay in a village of ex-convicts not far from the camp. She and the priest, whose name she never told Lenina, created a new life for themselves in a log cabin on the outskirts of KarLag, tending a tiny vegetable plot and doing odd jobs for the camp’s personnel.

She almost never spoke of her camp ‘husband’ or of their child Viktor, who Martha said had died just before her return to Moscow. But Lenina always suspected that Martha had given the child away after her priest had left her to return to his own family, handing over the infant to local doctors or an orphanage. Lenina never cited any evidence for this belief; she just suspects that it is so, for no other reason than ‘I see it with my heart.’ In Moscow in 2007 she encountered a local prosecutor called Viktor Shcherbakov; but after close examination by my aunt the man turned out to be not her long-lost half-brother but a stranger who shared her mother’s surname. After a few days’ reflection Lenina decided, at the age of eighty-two, not to pursue Viktor, the little boy lost in 1948. ‘What if I find him and he’s just a bum?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t have Boris’s blood, which made us all great. He has Martha’s blood, and we don’t need any more of that.’

Instead of a normal passport, Martha was given a piece of paper confirming her release and a special passport restricting her from living in or near a major city for life. The Soviet Union of the 1940s abounded with such people, whose freedom of residence was limited – they were condemned to a life as a nonperson because of the fatal stamp in their passport.

Luckily for Martha, her son-in-law Sasha was already working as a junior lawyer in the Ministry of Justice. He saved her by a loophole in the paperwork. Martha’s family name appeared in the prison paperwork as ‘Shcherbakova’, the Russianized, female version of her surname. But on her birth certificate she was ‘Shcherbak’, the neuter Ukrainian spelling. Sasha convinced his local police office to issue a passport to Martha Shcherbak, an innocent person with no police record and no official ‘limit’ on her existence. On paper, then, she was an upstanding Soviet citizen. Inside, it seemed to those around her, her soul had been shredded.

Most of the children of Lyudmila’s orphanage finished their schooling at fourteen, and after a year’s technical training in the sewing room at Saltykovka were sent to the textile mills of Ivanovo, 120 miles north of Moscow, to work as seamstresses, or to noxious chemical factories in central Asia. Lyudmila’s teachers petitioned the local authorities to have her sent to another local school where she could study three more years and have a chance of applying to university. Permission came through, though Lyudmila had to earn her keep at the orphanage by teaching some of the younger classes and organizing amateur dramatics. This is where she first practised the emphatic pedagogical manner she has today, singing out instructions syllable by syllable as she drills classes of slightly terrified English students in the arcana of the Russian verb, brooking no nonsense or error during the class, but then gushing with unexpected emotion for years afterwards at her pupils’ successes.

If Stalin had not died on 5 March 1953 of a brain haemorrhage, my mother’s life would have been very different. The news of the dictator’s death was broken to the children at Saltykovka by the head teacher, near-hysterical with grief, and all the children burst into tears at the news. For many of the orphans, the avuncular, mustachioed great leader was the closest thing they had ever known to a real father. In Moscow, Lenina stood in the two-million-strong crowds at Stalin’s funeral. She, too, wept genuine tears for the passing of Stalin, without ever thinking that this kindly, smiling man was responsible for taking her parents away from her.

With Stalin gone, Lyudmila’s world tilted on its axis. She graduated from the Saltykovka school top of her class, with a near-perfect grade (she still remembers the mistake that cost her a perfect score: mistakenly putting a comma in the sentence ‘hippopotamuses, and elephants’). Under Stalin, a place at a prestigious university would have been unthinkable for a child of an enemy of the people. Mila would probably have gone to a provincial teachers’ training college, and spent her life as a schoolmistress.

But now Lenina dared to hope that the stain on her sister’s record could be overlooked. She was now working as a copy editor of doctoral theses at the Institute of Jurisprudence, a job wangled for her by Sasha. Lenina found an acquaintance who knew the Rector of the History faculty of Moscow State University, and arranged a meeting to lobby for Lyudmila’s admission. She was lucky. The man was either simply kindhearted, or bore secret scars of his own from life under Stalin. As Lenina explained what had happened to her and her sister since their parents’ arrest, the man broke down in tears. In September 1953 Lyudmila was admitted to read history at the Soviet Union’s most prestigious university, housed in a vast, newly constructed Stalinist skyscraper on the Lenin Hills – a palace of Socialist learning with all of Moscow spread at its feet. When she heard the news, she says, ‘I grew wings.’

Stalin’s death also brought the hope that their father might be released from the Gulag. In 1954 the MVD, the latest incarnation of the NKVD, broke their seventeen-year silence on the fate of Boris Bibikov. In response to yet another letter from his mother they replied, in terse officialese, that Bibikov, B.L., had died of cancer in 1944 in a prison camp. The next year Sophia wrote a personal plea to Stalin’s successor, the new Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, that at least his name be cleared. The letter was duly entered into her late son’s file.

‘Respected Nikita Sergeyevich,’ she wrote. ‘I am turning to you as an old woman, a mother who had three sons, three Communists. Only one is left [Yakov], who serves in the ranks of our glorious Soviet Army. One [Isaac] diedon the front in the Great Patriotic War, defending our Motherland. The other, Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, was arrested in 1937 as an enemy of the people and sentenced to ten years. His term should have expired in 1947.

‘Nikita Sergeyevich, my son… I feel, I am sure that Boris was innocent, that there was a mistake. Is it not possible after eighteen years to sort the matter out, and rehabilitate him? I still cannot find the truth, to know, in the end, what happened. I am not a Party member, I am eighty years old, but I honestly raised my children to love their Motherland and to serve her faithfully. They gave her their knowledge, their health, their lives, for the joy of Communism, for peace on earth, so that their great Motherland would prosper… Dear Nikita Sergeyevich, I ask you to look into this matter as a Communist, and if my son is innocent, to rehabilitate him. Respectfully yours, Bibikova.’

Boris Bibikov’s case was re-opened in 1955, one of the very first wave of the so-called rehabilitation investigations, judicial reviews of the victims of the Purges ordered by Khrushchev in the wake of his ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress. The task of reviewing Bibikov’s case, and thousands like it, was a colossal bureau- cratic undertaking. Detailed depositions were taken from dozens of witnesses who knew Boris Bibikov and the files of everyone involved in his case were closely studied. Ironically, the part of the file covering the rehabilitation investigation was almost three times longer than the spare seventy-nine documents it took to arrest, convict and kill him.

All those who were questioned about Boris’s supposed counter-revolutionary activities pronounced him a sincere and dedicated Communist.

‘I can only describe him positively; he gave himself wholly to the Party and to the life of the factory and had tremendous authority among the workers,’ Ivan Kavitsky, Boris’s deputy at the KhTZ, told the investigators. ‘I know nothing of his anti-Soviet activities – on the contrary, he was a devoted Communist.’

‘I never heard of any political deviation on [Bibikov’s] part. People said he had been arrested as an enemy of the people but no one knew why,’ said Lev Veselov, a factory accountant.

‘I remember that my comrades in the management expressed surprise when he was arrested,’ said the typist Olga Irzhavskaya.

On 22 February 1956, a closed session of the Supreme Court of the USSR produced a lengthy report, marked ‘Secret’, formally overturning the decision of the Military Collegium reached on 13 October 1937. A short note was sent to Boris’s family announcing his rehabilitation, along with a death certificate. The ‘cause of death’ clause was left blank.

University was heaven for Lyudmila. She moved into a hall of residence at Stromynka Street in Sokolniki in north Moscow, where she shared a dormitory with fifteen other girls. In time she moved to her own room in the main university building itself, in its spreading grounds in the Lenin Hills. Her whole childhood had been spent in Soviet institutions, and the crowded social life of the university was a decent substitute for a family. She immediately made lifelong friends among the brightest of her generation. One was Yury Afanasiyev, a stocky, outspoken fellow historian who was to become one of the intellectual leading lights of Perestroika. Another contemporary was a former farm boy from Stavropol with a thick country accent and a total lack of cosmopolitan irony about Soviet life which Mila and her friends were quickly developing. He tried doggedly to court Lenina’s friend, Nadia Mikhailova, who found him insufferably provincial and repeatedly turned him down. His name was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. ‘How can a descendent of a prosperous Moscow merchant marry a Stavropol truck driver?’ Nadia used to joke.

Lyudmila learned good French and some basic Latin and German, and the art of outward conformity and hard work. Her essays, written in a perfect copperplate hand, are models of thoroughness and diligence. She was a creature of the Soviet system which had brought her up, with its emphasis on hearty communal activity and its complete lack of physical or mental privacy. The student life of the 1950s was filled with semi-voluntary after-class readings of Moliere, nature rambles and amateur dramatics. But despite the constraints of ideology and communal life, Mila felt exhilaratingly free, at last, to explore the foreign and limitless world of literature. She read Dumas and Hugo, Zola and Dostoyevsky, the sentimental outpourings of Alexander Grin and the pastorals of Ivan Bunin. There, in books, music and theatre, she finally found her own private window on to a world big enough for her huge energies.

Lyudmila was popular. Her passion – or one of her many passions – was ballet. Lenina had introduced her to the Bolshoi theatre after Sasha had insisted that his young sister-in-law be given ‘a start in life’, and they would go as often as they could.

Lyudmila’s love affair with the great nineteenth-century theatre on Okhotny Ryad burgeoned during her student days. She and her friends would go several times a week to the Bolshoi, applauding wildly from the cheap seats at the end of every act and then keeping a cold vigil on the street outside Door 17 to greet the dancers as they came out with huge bunches of flowers. Valery Golovister, a thin and sensitive young man, the brother of Lyudmila’s best girlfriend, Galya, was her closest male friend. They were both fervent balletomanes. He seemed to have no interest in girls, despite his good looks, but those were innocent times and no one, at least not Lyudmila and her not-very-worldly girlfriends, thought to suspect him of the homosexuality he carefully concealed.

For Lyudmila and her friends, it was not enough just to seethey had to throw themselves into the performance, to adore the actors and dancers and weep over the libretto. They stood in shifts for tickets to the touring Comédie Française, the first foreign company to play in Moscow since before the war, and went to almost every one of the forty performances of the repertoire, which ranged from Molière’s Tartuffe to Corneille’s Le Cid. They whooped ‘Vive la France!’ from the gallery, and threw flowers every night. Outside the theatre on the last night of the season, they were in the cheering crowd which followed the actors from Theatre Square to the National Hotel. KGB men in the crowd kicked Lyudmila viciously from behind with heavy boots, trying to subdue the girls’ unseemly adulation of the visiting foreigners.

When Gérard Philippe, the greatest French actor of his generation, came to Moscow the next year for a film festival, Lyudmila’s gang mobbed him. He chatted politely to his Russian fans and promised to return. After Philippe had returned to France, Mila and her friends had a whip-round and collected money for a present for their hero. One of the girls took the train to Palekh, a village famous for its miniatures on lacquer boxes, and commissioned a portrait of Philippe as Julien Sorel in the film Le Rougeet le Noir. When the French Communists Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon visited Moscow a few months later Lyudmila and four of her friends marched into the Hotel Moskva – a bold move, since the place housed foreigners and was crawling with KGB officers – and called Triolet from the lobby, explaining that they had a present they wanted her to take to Gerard Philippe in Paris. Mystified but impressed, Triolet came down to collect it and duly delivered the gift to Philippe when she returned. Madness, unthinkable madness to do such a thing just five years before. But the Khrushchev thaw had changed the rules, and Lyudmila and her friends tested the limits of the new world as far as they dared.

In L’Humanité, the French-language Communist daily which was the only French paper available to the Soviet public, a friend of Lyudmila’s read that Gérard Philippe was in Peking on a cultural trip. For a lark – a dangerous lark – the girls went to the Central Telegraph on Gorky Street and booked an international phone call to China. They had no idea which hotel he was staying at, so the operator, a young woman who appreciated the audacity of the thing, told her Chinese counterpart to put them through to the biggest hotel in town. Half an hour later, Lyudmila’s friend Olga was talking to Gerard Philippe, who told her he would be stopping over in Moscow on his way back to Paris.

At Vnukovo Airport the police tried to stop them, but the twenty girls rushed past on to the tarmac and crowded round the steps. Philippe was by then terminally ill with hepatitis picked up in South America. He was ashen and looked far older than his thirty-seven years. He recognized Lyudmila and greeted her warmly. She asked him to sign her copy of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir.

’Pour I.yudmila, en souvenir du soleil de Moscou,’ Philippe wrote. It is still on a shelf in my mother’s bedroom.

Mila graduated from Moscow State University with a Gold Medal, one of the ablest students of her year. On leaving, Lyudmila took the risky option of turning down a universityassigned position and instead looked for a job on her own. She rented a room from a middle-aged couple near Lermontovskaya Metro, where she slept on a camp bed. Her landlord was an aviation engineer, and Lyudmila tutored their son in return for board and lodging. The engineer didn’t have any official work, except for odd jobs among his neighbours, and Lyudmila suspected he was in disgrace of some sort and lying low. The family ekedouta living in the cracks of the Soviet system, where a man without ajob was a non-person with no money, no access to school for his children, to work canteens or holidays. The family lived on carrot and bone soup; Lyudmila would bring sausages when she found them and had time to wait in line.

Yekaterina Ivanovna Markitan, the wife of an old Party colleague of Boris Bibikov from the Kharkov Tractor Factory days, came from South Russia on a shopping trip and stayed at Lenina’s. She told Luydmila that an old friend was now director of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, dedicated to the study and preservation of the legacy of Communism’s founders. Her name was Yevgeniya Stepanova, and when Mila contacted her she immediately offered Mila a job as a junior researcher. Lyudmila had no great personal enthusiasm for Marxism or Leninism, but the job was in Moscow, and it was intellectual, so she jumped at it. Her work was to help in the giant task of collating and copy-editing the collected works of Karl Marx and his friend and sponsor, Friedrich Engels. She found the voluminous outpourings of the two men tedious. But the Institute had an outstanding library, her job gave her ample opportunity to practise her French, and she found her colleagues intelligent and lively. Foreign Communists and senior academic practitioners of the almost theological science of Communist doctrine would visit often, with Lyudmila being called upon to translate and accompany them. And then there was the excellently stocked staff canteen, on the ground floor of the small neoclassical palace which housed the Institute, which had formerly belonged to the Princess Dolgoruky and served as the headquarters of the Nobles’ Assembly before being put to a more egalitarian use.

In 1995 I stumbled on the old Institute of Marxism and Leninism by chance. With the demise of the Institute and indeed of Marxism and Leninism in general, the old palace had come down in the world. A group of descendants of Russia’s nobility had somehow managed to reclaim the building, but had no funds to restore it. So it sat mouldering in its overgrown garden, lonely and irrelevant.

The newly re-formed Nobles’ Assembly threw a fundraising ball in a disused gym which occupied one wing. I went in my father’s old dinner suit, which he had worn when he met Nikita Khrushchev as a young diplomat in 1959. The vestiges of Russia’s noble houses, those who had not emigrated and yet managed to escape the Revolution, the Civil War and the Purges, were out in force, inexpertly dancing as a Russian army band played mazurkas and Viennese waltzes. But the organizers were groping for a past no one remembered, and striving to revive traditions which lived on only in their imaginations. Prince Golitsyn, in grey plastic shoes, chatted to Count Lopukhin, in a worn polyester suit, as their heavily made-up wives fluttered plastic Souvenir of Venice fans.

The palace had once been magnificent, but decades of aggressive Soviet philistinism had reduced it to a soulless warren of cheap chipboard partitions and corridors lined with curling linoleum. The high, heavy windows overlooking the courtyard had long ago been painted shut. Everything which could be stolen had been, including the door handles and light switches.

I tried to imagine my mother, young and full of enthusiasm, limping down these corridors for her first job interview with the Institute’s director. Or my mother, defiant and voluble, facing the viciousness of her colleagues at the Party meeting convened to censure her for her romance with a foreigner. But she wasn’t there; I couldn’t feel any ghosts in the place as it reverberated to the oompah music of the dance band.

By the spring of 1960 Lyudmila had been made a full staff member of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism, yet the creaking wheels of the housing bureaucracy turned slowly. She was eligible for her own apartment or, as an unmarried woman, more likely a room in a communal apartment. In March her colleague Klava Konnova, her two children and ageing father, were finally allocated an apartment of their own, and they moved out of a tiny, seven-metre-square room in a kommunalka on Starokonushenny Pereulok, near the Old Arbat. Lyudmila put her name down for it, and moved in. It was tiny, but it was a home. She was twenty-six years old, and for the first time in her life she had a space entirely to call her own.