The Whisperers

Julia and Vladimir had constant fights. On one occasion, when Vladimir was angry because his mother had refused to write to Yezhov for the return of his toy gun and some military books, which had been confiscated by the NKVD during the house search, he said to her in anger: ‘It is a shame they have not shot Papa, since he is an enemy of the people.’ On another, when he came home with a poor mark from school, Julia lost her temper and swore at Vladimir. She told him, as she put it in her diary, ‘that his bad behaviour showed he was the son of an enemy of the people.’ Bursting into tears, Vladimir replied: ‘Is it my fault that I was born the son of an enemy? I don’t want you as my mother any more, I am going to an orphanage.’ Julia threatened to send him off to bed with just a crust of bread. Vladimir said he would ‘cut her throat’. Then she hit him twice across the face.¹⁵⁰

Julia was at the end of her rope. Evicted from their flat and struggling to find a proper job, she began to question her husband even more intensely. ‘There is only one thought in my head – who is Piatnitsky?’ Julia asked herself.

20 July 1937

… Yesterday evening I thought about Piatnitsky and I was full of bitterness: how could he have let us fall into such a shameful mess? How can it be that he worked with those people and knew their methods, and yet could not foresee that they would condemn us to a life of torment and hunger?… One could bear a bitter grudge against Piatnitsky. He let his children be destroyed; he lost all our money, and it wasn’t much to begin with. But who exactly are these men who have stolen all our things? Authority now is nothing but arbitrary terror – and everybody is afraid. I am going mad. What am I thinking? What am I thinking?¹⁵¹

For six months Julia carried on this self-interrogation in her diary, trying to work out who her husband really was. Informed that he had been charged with espionage and counter-revolutionary activities on 7 February 1938, Julia wrote in her diary:

Who is he? If he is a professional revolutionary, as he claimed to be, this man I knew for seventeen years, then he was unfortunate: he was surrounded by spies and enemies, who sabotaged his work, and that of many others, and he just didn’t see it… But evidently Piatnitsky never was a professional revolutionary, but a professional scoundrel and a spy, which explains why he was so closed and severe as a man. Evidently, he was not the man we thought he was… And all of us – I, his wife, the children – had no real significance for him.¹⁵²

Igor was arrested on 9 February 1938. He was in his classroom at school when two soldiers came for him. Igor was imprisoned in the Butyrki jail. Consumed by worry for her son, Julia fell into complete despair. According to Vladimir, she had a nervous breakdown – she spent whole days in bed and often thought of suicide.¹⁵³ The only thing that kept her going was the idea of living for her sons, which she repeated like a mantra in her diary. ‘It would be best to die,’ she wrote on 9 March. ‘But that would leave my Vovka and Igor without a human being in the world. I’m all they have, and that means that I must fight to stay alive.’ Yet there were moments when Julia felt so despondent that the only salvation she could imagine was to break all human ties, even with her sons:

17 February 1938

Last night I thought I had found the solution: not death, though that is the easiest and most appealing solution, given my weak will and deep despair… but this idea: the children are not necessary: give Vovka to the state and live just for work – work ceaselessly, take time only for reading, live close to nature… have no feelings for any human being. It seemed such a good solution – to spend oneself in work, and not to have anybody close for them to take away. Why do I have Vovka and what good am I to him? I am buried by a mountain much too big to enjoy the life of a normal human being, to live for Vovka. He just wants to live, to have friends, the sun, a cosy home, a meaningful existence, but I – I am the wife of a counter-revolutionary.¹⁵⁴

Julia tried to figure out the reasons for the arrest of Osip and Igor. Unlike Vladimir, she could not bring herself to hate Osip as an ‘enemy of the people’. She noted in her diary: ‘Vovka torments me because I am unable to hate Piatnitsky; at first I thought that I would surely end up hating him, but in the end I have too many doubts.’ She tried to reason with Vladimir, arguing that his father ‘could be innocent and they made a mistake, or maybe he was deceived by the enemies’.¹⁵⁵ Julia believed in the existence of ‘enemies of the people’. She often pointed out ‘suspicious’ people in her diary, and she had no doubts about the justice of the Soviet courts. During the Bukharin trial, she was convinced that the ‘evil-doers’ had been rightly sentenced to be shot. Politically, she was naive, slow to understand the reality that engulfed her. She was more than willing to make Bukharin a scapegoat for the catastrophe that had destroyed her family. Commenting on the execution of Bukharin and his co-defendants in March 1938, Julia thought that ‘the spilling of their evil blood’ was ‘too small a price for them to pay for the suffering the Party has endured’.

Today they are going to erase them from this earth, but that won’t do much to reduce my hatred. I would give them an awful death: build a special cage for them in a museum for counter-revolutionaries, and let us come and gawk at them… That would be unbearable for them: citizens coming to stare at them as if they were animals. Our hatred for them would never cease. Let them see how we go on working to build a better life, how we are all united, how we love our leaders, leaders who are not traitors. Let them see how we struggle against Fascism while they do nothing but feed themselves like animals, for they are not worthy to be called people.

Picturing the ‘better life’ of the future, when ‘only honest people will be allowed to live and work’, Julia saw some hope for her own family:

Maybe Igor will return, and Piatnitsky as well – if, that is, he is honest and, of course, innocent of the crimes which were committed by so many enemies, or of failing to detect all these reptiles; if his intentions were honest, then of course he will return. How I’d like to know! Piatnitsky – are you guilty in any way? Did you disagree with the Party line? Were you opposed to even one of our leaders? How much easier my life would be, if I knew the truth. And as far as Igor is concerned, I think of the words of F—. ‘Everything that is well made will withstand the fire. And that which doesn’t, we don’t need.’¹⁵⁶

Julia resolved to place her faith in the fire: if Osip was innocent, he too would survive the Terror.

Piatnitsky was imprisoned in the Butyrki jail, the same prison where his son was held. Lev Razgon encountered him in a crowded cell (built for twenty-five but housing sixty-seven) at the start of April 1938. Razgon saw a ‘thin and crooked old man [Piatnitsky was then fifty-six] who bore the marks of battle in his face’.

[Piatnitsky] explained, when he saw me looking at his face, that these were the marks left by the metal buckle of his interrogator’s belt. I had seen Piatnitsky in the early months of 1937… The man who stood before me now was totally unrecognizable as the man I had seen before. Only the eyes were the same bright, lively eyes, though now much more sad. They betrayed an immense spiritual suffering.

Piatnitsky asked about Razgon’s case, about how he had been incriminated, and then Razgon asked him about his:

He went silent. Then he said that he had no illusions about his fate, that his case was moving to a close and he was prepared. He told me how they questioned him without a break, how they tortured him, beating out of him exactly what they needed, and threatening to beat him to death. He hadn’t finished talking when they came for him again.¹⁵⁷

On 10 April, Piatnitsky was transferred to the Lefortovo prison, where he was systematically tortured and interrogated every night from 12 April until his trial at the end of July. According to his main interrogator, who denied using physical measures of coercion, Piatnitsky behaved ‘calmly and with restraint, but once, when he was in a state of agitation for some reason, he asked me for permission to have a drink, and going up to the water carafe, struck himself on the head with it’.¹⁵⁸ Osip was tried by the Military Tribunal of the Supreme Soviet, along with 137 other prisoners, on 27 July. He was charged with being one of the leaders of a Fascist spy-ring of Trotskyists and Rightists in the Comintern. A list of names of the convicted was sent by Yezhov to Stalin. At the top of the list, preserved in the Presidential Archives in the Kremlin, there is a brief handwritten order: ‘Shoot all 138. I. St[alin]. V. Molotov.’¹⁵⁹

None of this was known to Julia. She did not even know that Piatnitsky was being held in the Butyrki when she joined the queues outside its gates to hand in a parcel for her son. The longer she heard nothing from Osip, the harder it became for her to hold on to the hope that he was innocent. Everybody told her to forget Osip, to think about herself and her two sons. On 12 April, the night Osip’s torture recommenced in the Lefortovo prison, Julia had a nightmare. She dreamed that she was being tormented by a cat. She thought the dream was significant and wondered if it meant that her son Igor was being tortured in the Butyrki (she had heard rumours about such things from the women in the prison queues). The thought of Igor’s suffering altered Julia’s feelings towards Osip, as she recorded in her diary:

My life has become an endless downward spiral. I talk with myself, in a whisper, and feel complete despair – for Piatnitsa [Piatnitsky] and Igor, but especially for my poor boy. He is spending his seventeeth spring in a miserable, dark and dirty prison, in a cell with strangers. The main thing is that he is innocent. Piatnitsky has lived his life – he failed to recognize the enemies who surrounded him, or became degenerate, which is not so astonishing, because he gave himself to politics, but Igor…¹⁶⁰

The idea that it was too late to do anything for Osip reinforced Julia’s determination to do whatever necessary to help Igor, whose life was still ahead of him. She had accepted the possibility of her husband’s guilt. But she was not prepared to accept that her sixteen-year-old son could have been involved in any crime. Julia decided to renounce her husband in the hope that it would help save her son.

She went to the procurator’s office in Moscow. Informed that Piatnitsky had committed a serious crime against the state, Julia replied: ‘If that is the case, he means nothing to me any more.’ The procurator advised Julia to begin a new life. She told him she would like to work for the NKVD, and he encouraged her to make a formal application, promising to support it. Julia saw the procurator as a sympathetic man:

I shook his hand warmly, though perhaps this was to display too much sentiment, something which I have never been able to control – but I felt close to this man, whose task is difficult but necessary, and I wanted to express my respect for him as a comrade, to show my moral support for those comrades who are rooting out the swine from our Party. Again I emphasize: despite my own suffering, and despite the possibility that innocents are being sacrificed (let one of these not be my Igor!), I must be true to principles, I must stay disciplined and patient, and I must, I absolutely must, find a way to make an active contribution, or else there will be no place for me among people.

Once she had adandoned her husband, Julia was prepared to think the worst of him. She wrote in her diary on 16 April:

Oh, I just can’t understand it! But if it is so, then how I despise him, how I hate his base and cowardly, yet to me incomprehensible, soul!… Oh, what a good act he put on! Now I understand why he surrounded himself with the ‘warm companionship’ of all those spies, provocateurs and bureaucrats. But surely he had no real friends. He was essentially a gloomy man who never opened himself to me… Maybe he never loved the Party, maybe he never had its interests at heart? But what about us, me and the children, what was he thinking?¹⁶¹

Three weeks later, Igor was hauled before a three-man tribunal and charged with organizing a counter-revolutionary student group – a charge so absurd that even the tribunal threw it out, though it sentenced Igor to five years in a labour camp on the lesser and much vaguer charge of anti-Soviet agitation.^* Julia was told of her son’s conviction on 27 May. She became hysterical and demanded that the procurator arrest her as well: ‘If he is guilty, so am I.’ Reflecting on events that evening, Julia groped towards an understanding of the Terror:

Perhaps Piatnitsky really was bad, and we must all perish on his account. But it is hard to die when I do not know who Piatnitsky really is, nor what crime Igor committed. He could not have done anything wrong. But then why did they take him? Maybe as someone who might become a criminal, because he is the son of an enemy… Maybe it’s a way of forcefully mobilizing that part of the population which is not trusted by the state but whose labour can be used? I don’t know, but it is logical. Of course if that is the case then Igor, and all the other people like him, will never come back. They serve a useful purpose to the state, but they depart from life. Anyway it is terrifying to have to remain behind – to have to wait and not to know.¹⁶²

Julia herself was arrested on 27 October 1938. She was thirty-nine years old. Her diary was seized at the time of her arrest and used as evidence to convict her of conspiring with her husband against the government. She was sent to the Kandalaksha labour camp in the far northern region of Murmansk. Vladimir was sent with her, although he was very ill, having just recovered from an operation, and had to be taken from his bed. At Kandalaksha Vladimir was kept in the barracks and fed twice a day by an NKVD guard while Julia went to work on the construction of Niva-GES, a hydro-electric station near the camp. Shortly after their arrival Vladimir escaped and made his way back to Moscow, where he stayed with various schoolfriends, including the family of Yevgeny Loginov, whose father worked in Stalin’s personal secretariat. Earlier the Loginovs had turned their back on the Piatnitskys, but now something made them change their minds. Common decency perhaps. Vladimir stayed with the Loginovs for three months. Then, one evening, he overheard a conversation between the Loginovs: Yevgeny’s father had got into trouble for taking in Piatnitsky’s son. To save them from any more trouble, Vladimir turned himself in to the Moscow Soviet. The official to whom he spoke was an old comrade of Piatnitsky from October 1917. He ordered sandwiches for Vladimir and then called the police. Vladimir was taken to the NKVD detention centre in the old Danilov Monastery, from which the children of ‘enemies of the people’ were sent on to orphanages across the Soviet Union.¹⁶³

In March 1939, Julia was denounced by three co-workers at Niva-GES. They claimed that she had said that her husband had been wrongly arrested, that he was innocent, and that he had considered Stalin to be unfit as a leader of the proletariat. Convicted of anti-Soviet agitation, Julia was sentenced to five years in the Karaganda labour camp in Kazakhstan. Igor was a prisoner in the industrial section of the camp, and somehow Julia arranged a meeting with him there. ‘We spent a remarkable and very sad day together,’ recalls Igor, ‘and then she went back [to the women’s section of the camp].’ Physically frail and mentally unbalanced, Julia was in no condition to withstand the hardships of camp life. She was still beautiful and attracted the attention of the camp commandant (which may explain why she had been allowed to visit Igor); but she refused his sexual demands, for which he punished her by sending her to work as a manual labourer in the construction of a dam. For sixteen hours every day she stood waist-high in freezing water, digging earth. She became ill and died on an unrecorded date in the winter of 1940.

In 1958, after his release from the labour camps, Igor was visited by an old acquaintance of the family, a woman called Zina, who had seen his mother in the Karaganda camp, where she too was a prisoner. Zina told Igor that Julia had died in the camp hospital and that she was buried in a mass grave. In 1986, Igor received another visit from Zina, by this time a woman of eighty. She told him that on the previous occasion she had lied about his mother, because Julia, before she died, had made her promise to spare Igor the awful details of her death (and because, as Zina now admitted, she had been afraid to speak the truth). But recently Zina had seen Julia in her dreams – Julia had asked her about her son – and she saw this as a sign that she should tell Igor about his mother’s final days. Julia had not died in hospital. In December 1940, Zina had gone to look for Julia in the Karaganda camp. No one wanted to tell her where she was, but then one woman pointed to a sheep-pen on the steppe and said that she could be found there. Zina walked into the pen. Amongst the sheep, lying on the freezing ground, was Julia:

She was dying, her whole body was blown up with fever, she was burning hot and shaking. The sheep stood guard around her but offered no protection from the wind and snow, which lay around in mounds. I crouched beside her, she tried to raise herself but did not have the strength. I took her hand and tried to warm it with my breath.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. I told her my name and said only that I came from you, that you had asked me to find her…

How she stirred: ‘Igor – my boy,’ she whispered from her frozen lips. ‘My little boy, help him, I beseech you, help him to survive.’ I calmed her down and promised to look after you, as if that depended on me. ‘Give me your word,’ Julia whispered. ‘Do not tell him how his mother died. Give me your word…’

She was half-delirious. I crouched down beside her and promised her.

Then from behind me a guard shouted: ‘Where did you come from? How did you get here?’ The guard grabbed me and frog-marched me out of the sheep-pen. ‘Who are you?’

I explained that I had come as the section leader of a tool workshop and had found the woman accidentally. But I was detained. They told me that I should not breathe a word about what I had seen: ‘Shut your mouth, and say nothing!’

Julia died in the sheep-pen. She had been left there when she fell ill, and no one was allowed to visit her. She was buried where she died.¹⁶⁴