The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

Afterword and Acknowledgements

The Whisperers has a long history. The idea of the book goes back to middle of the 1980s, when I was a graduate researcher in Moscow. As a student of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, I was eager to meet anyone who could still recall that period. I had become friends with Zhenia Golovnia, the granddaughter of the film-maker Anatoly Golovnia. Her mother, Oksana, told me many stories about the family’s history in the 1920s and 1930s, and put me into contact with some friends, who had been born in the ‘peaceful times’, as she liked to call the years before the First World War. Over the next months, I visited the homes of about a dozen of Oksana’s friends, mainly elderly ladies, who were too young to recall anything about the Civil War and, it seemed, too nervous to speak in depth about the history that had really shaped their lives: the years of Stalin’s rule.

That first attempt at an oral history taught me to appreciate the importance of family memory as a counterweight to the official narrative of Soviet history. After 1991, I thought again about the possibility of researching for a book on the subject of The Whisperers. The sudden outpouring of personal memoirs about the Stalinist repressions encouraged the idea. But my instinct was that older people, on the whole, would keep their thoughts and feelings to themselves until they were sure that the Communists would not return, and that might take many years. In some ways I was wrong: the early 1990s are now widely seen as the heyday of oral history in the former Soviet Union, certainly compared with the Putin years, when the restoration of authoritarian government encouraged many Russians to return to their reticent habits. But in other ways my instinct had been right: for what people wanted to record in that first rush of commemoration were the facts of their repression, the details of arrest, imprisonment and rehabilitation, rather than the damage to their inner lives, the painful memories of personal betrayal and lost relationships that had shaped their history.

By 2002, when I finished working on Natasha’s Dance, I felt at last the time had come to approach this uncharted territory. The last generation to reach adulthood before 1953 was disappearing fast, so there was a sense of urgency that this was our last real chance to understand the Stalin period through the internal life of ordinary families and individuals. The average age of the people giving interviews and archives to the research project for The Whisperers was eighty. To the best of my knowledge, at least twenty-seven of them died (about 6 per cent of the total sample) before the completion of the book.

My first inquiries were directed to the Russian state and public archives, where I hoped to locate private papers about family life and then conduct interviews with the people who donated them. This involved a very long and ultimately rather fruitless trawl through collections of letters, notebooks, diaries and memoirs, often written in a barely decipherable scrawl, yielding bits of information from which it was difficult to draw any conclusions (almost nothing from these archives went into The Whisperers). At this stage of my research I was helped by several employees: Katia Bunina and Julia Sharapova, who worked with me in the Moscow archives; Nikolai Mikhailov, who collected materials from the archives in St Petersburg; and Nikolai Kuzmin, who worked in the archives in Orel and elsewhere. I would also like to thank my two old teachers and comrades for their support in these early stages of research: Viktor Danilov (1925–2004), the historian of the Soviet peasantry, who took a keen interest in my research and helped to open doors in RGAE; and Teodor Shanin, who gave my project the backing of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Science.

Simultaneously with my searching through the archives, I would visit people in their homes, listening to their stories from the Stalin period and asking whether they had private papers they could give. The project spread by word of mouth – still the most efficient means of working in Russia – as contacts I developed told their friends about my work. I was overwhelmed by the interest from people asking to be interviewed, offering a family memoir, letters, notebooks or some other precious manuscript they wanted me to publish (or perhaps hoped to sell). It is impractical to thank everyone who helped me at this stage (they are named in the List of Interviews) but I owe a special debt to Sasha Kozyrev, who kindly agreed to interview a number of his friends and acquaintances in St Petersburg; Ida Slavina, who gave me several interviews, many documents and photographs from her archives and sent me articles and information about her family; Yevgeniia Vittenburg, Ada Levidova, Bella Levitina. Olga Ramenskaia and Galina Petrova, who all gave interviews and family archives to the project; Leonid Makhnach, who put his recollections into lucid prose and handed over precious documents; Vakhtang Mikheladze, who gave several interviews and put me into contact with his family in Tbilisi; and Zhenia Golovnia, who not only transcribed and scanned her family archives, but also made available the many interviews and documents she had collected from former prisoners and administrators of the ALZhIR labour camp for her film Izmennitsy (1990). Zhenia advised me on the complex history, the rumours, intrigues and personalities of the Soviet film world and introduced me to many families with interesting stories and archives from the Stalin period.

It was through Zhenia that I met Aleksei Simonov, to whom I owe the greatest debt of all. I had already known of Aleksei as a film director, journalist and activist for human rights and press freedom (in 1999 he became the President of the Foundation for the Defence of Glasnost in Moscow), but I did not know his family’s extraordinary history, for the story of the Laskins, on his mother’s side, had been almost totally excluded from the biographies of his famous father which I read in preparation for my first meeting with him in his Moscow flat, just around the corner from Konstantin Simonov Street. Aleksei had kept the Laskin family archive in a drawer following the death of his mother, Zhenia Laskina, in 1992. From these materials he had written his own touching memoir of his parents (Chastnaia kollektsiia) in 1999, but from the start he welcomed my interest and put his trust in me to become what he called ‘the family’s historian’. Aleksei allowed me to copy the Laskin archive. He gave up many hours from his busy working schedule to brief me on the details of his family’s history and correct my mistakes. Aleksei is a marvellous raconteur. In our many interviews and conversations around the kitchen table in his flat, often lasting late into the night, he conjured up so vividly the special atmosphere of the Laskin household – a warmth and informality that Aleksei and his wife Galina have managed to preserve in their home – that I began to feel that I was not just a historian but practically a member of the extended family. I had the same sensation whenever I visited Aleksei’s aunt, Fania Samuilovna, or Dusia, as she is called, the last surviving Laskin sister, who lives with her son on the eleventh floor of a modern tower block near Ilich Square. Fania was moved to the apartment in 1990, after she and her sister Sonia were evicted from their home in Sivtsev Vrazhek, where the family had lived for nearly sixty years. Sonia died in 1991. Fania’s memory is faltering. She was ninety-seven when she gave me her final interview. But sometimes, when I asked her about something we had discussed many times before, she would suddenly recall a long-forgotten detail about the Laskin family which otherwise would never have been known. For this reason, but mainly for her charm, I learned to cherish every moment spent in Dusia’s company.

I am deeply grateful to Aleksei for giving me complete and unrestricted access to his father’s huge archive in RGALI. Most of the papers I received from the previously closed sections of Simonov’s personal archive (in opis 9 and 10) had not been seen by any scholars previously. Indeed it soon became apparent that some of their most sensitive materials were unknown to the family itself. Unfortunately, as a result of my discoveries, which stirred up painful memories for some members of the family, in October 2005 Katia Simonova (Gudzenko), the head of the Commission in charge of Simonov’s literary estate, took the decision to close his archive to researchers until 2025.

Apart from the revelations of Simonov’s archives, I learned a lot about the writer’s life and character from interviews with colleagues, friends and relatives. I am particularly grateful to Maria Simonova, Lazar Lazarev, Nina Arkhipova, Aleksei and Sofia Karaganov, Andrei Erofeev and Marina Babak; and to many others who helped fill out my understanding of the world in which Simonov moved, including Iunna Morits, Viktor Erofeev, Viktoriia Shweitser, Galina Kravchenko and Aleksei Schmarinov.

By the spring of 2003, I had ongoing projects with a dozen families, but I desperately needed a research team to expand my work and put it on a more systematic footing. So it was a crucial breakthrough to receive two major grants, one from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the other from the Leverhulme Trust, in 2003. Without the generous support of these British institutions, it would have been impossible to write The Whisperers or complete the broader research project connected to the book, and I am extremely grateful to them both.

Supported by these grants, I employed the Memorial Society in St Petersburg, Moscow and Perm to interview survivors of the Stalin years and collect their family archives for transcription and scanning. The choice of these three branches of Memorial was not difficult. They had an excellent record in oral history, although in many ways the work they did for me, with its emphasis on the inner world of the individual and family relationships, was different from the projects they had done before which focused on the history of the Gulag. They all had large and active memberships, from which our participants were largely drawn, although the three went well beyond their natural constituency (victims of repression) to involve a much broader range of families, including many that had done very well by the Stalinist regime. In St Petersburg and Moscow the main advantage was the relatively high proportion of educated families that had retained written documents. In Perm it was the fact that the city had remained outside the occupied zone during 1941–5, so that the memory of the Stalin period was not confused with the trauma of the war, as well as the large number of former exiles and Gulag prisoners in the population of this area, which was once full of labour camps and ‘special settlements’.

The team in St Petersburg was led by Irina Flige, whose clever insights and advice, as well as her criticisms, were invaluable to the project. I have enjoyed and learned a lot from working with Irina and will always remain in her debt. The rest of the team in St Petersburg was made up by Tatiana Kosinova, a sympathetic listener who, like Irina, somehow managed to get far more from her interviews than anybody could have expected; and Tatiana Morgacheva, who took interviews and organized the archives with great skill. Irina Flige and Tatiana Kosinova also led the expedition to Norilsk, and Irina travelled on her own to Moscow, Saratov, Petrozavodsk, Krasnoiarsk and Stavropol to conduct interviews and collect materials.

Alyona Kozlova led the Moscow team with calm authority, always giving thoughtful and intelligent advice. Irina Ostrovskaia, Olga Binkina, Natalia Malykhina and Alyona Kozlova conducted the interviews with great sensitivity, while Galia Buvina organized the archives with exemplary efficiency. I am deeply grateful to them all.

In Perm the team was organized by the able and enthusiastic Aleksandr Kalykh, assisted by Elena Skriakova, with interviews conducted by Robert Latypov, Andrei Grebenshchikov, Svetlana Grebenshchikova and Mikhail Cherepanov. I would like to thank them all, particularly Robert and Andrei, who did most of the interviewing, always producing interesting results, and wrote helpful commentaries.

A few words are in order on the methodology of the project. I made the selection of the families to be included in the project from a database assembled by the research teams through telephone interviews with more than a thousand people in total. My main concern was to ensure that the final sample was drawn from a representative social base (it would have been very easy to skew it towards the intelligentsia, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg) whilst sticking to the principle that every family should have some sort of archive to corroborate the testimony given during interviews. In Perm this was difficult. It is a region heavily populated by former ‘kulaks’, uprooted from their homes, and other victims of the Stalinist regime. The vast majority of the people interviewed by telephone had no personal documents at all (many did not even have a photograph of their parents). But those who did have family archives were well worth hunting out.

During the first interview, people were allowed to reconstruct their life-story with minimal intervention (a standard practice of oral history), although I prepared a questionnaire for the interviewers and asked them to develop certain themes that had emerged already from the database. These interviews were very long, usually lasting several hours and often stretching over several days. Having analysed the edited transcripts, I would then decide the main direction and set questions for the secondary interviews, which explored in depth specific themes. There were usually two or three interviews for every family. About once a month, I would meet the research teams to discuss the interviews and select the materials from the families’ archives for transcription and scanning. The selection of the archives was relatively straightforward: we took as much as possible – personal documents, diaries, memoirs, notebooks, runs of letters in their entirety – as long as these were written before 1960 or shed light on the Stalin period. In the interviews, by contrast, we encountered many challenges, most of which will be familiar to practioners of oral history in the former Soviet Union. Techniques had to be developed to get people to think more reflectively about their lives; to disentangle direct memories from received impressions and opinions; to see the past and recall what they had thought without hindsight; and to overcome their fear of talking to strangers. The gradual building up of trust was essential. It would often taken a dozen visits before precious documents were handed over to our teams for copying (portable scanners and digital cameras made it possible to do this quickly in the home).

I am deeply grateful to all the families who contributed to the project with Memorial. It is impractical to thank them individually (they are all named in the List of Interviews) but special thanks must go to Antonina Znamenskaia, Inna Shikheyeva, Marksena Nikiforova, Elizaveta Delibash, Angelina Bushueva, Valentina Tikhanova, Nina Feofilaktova, Maria Vitkevich, Marianna Barkovskaia, Georgii Fursei, Maria Kuznetsova, Yevgeniia Vasileva, Nikolai Kovach, Valentin Muravsky, Rada Poloz, Anzhelika Sirman, Zoia Timofeyeva, Nikolai Lileyev, Vladimir Piatnitsky, Lev Netto, Julia Volkova, Larisa and Vitalii Garmash, Maia Rodak, Galina Adasinskaia, Roza Novoseltseva, Veronika Nevskaia, Svetlana Khlystova, Vera Minusova, Nikolai Meshalkin, Elfrida Meshalkina, Leonid Saltykov, Dmitry Streletsky, Irina Mikueva, Rezeda Taisina, Liubov Tetiueva, Vera Vasiltseva, Natalia Stepantseva, Ivan Uglitskikh, Sofia Ozemblovskaia, Valentina Kropotina, Tamara Trubina and Vera Turkina, who all gave many hours of their time and precious documents to the project. I would also like to thank Elena Bonner, who was interviewed as part of the Memorial project by Irina Flige in Boston, for giving me permission to cite extracts from Antonina W. Bouis’s translation of her book Mothers and Daughters (London: Hutchinson, 1992).

These people are the heroes of Whisperers. In a real sense this is their book: I have only given voice to them. For us these are stories, for them it is their lives.

At every stage of working on this book, I have been acutely conscious of my duty as a historian to tell these people’s stories in a way that they can recognize as a truthful reflection of their experience. There is no anonymous testimony in this book: with one or two exceptions, all the people who have given interviews or documents have agreed to have their names revealed. For this reason, sections of the later drafts were translated into Russian and given to the families concerned, so that they could make the necessary corrections and suggest alterations to the text. This was a long and complex process – not least because the way a person sees his own biography is often very different from the view of him that can be formed from a reading of his memoirs, letters, diaries and recorded words – but it was important that the subjects of this book should have a chance to correct it. There was no case where I was forced to change my overall interpretation, but many where my views were enriched and improved by the family’s input. A problem arose with just one family, the Shikheyevs (Gaisters): some members of the family took exception to the testimony of Inna’s older daughter, which was cut from the proofs on their request. Inna saw and corrected all the remaining Gaister passages but later closed her archive in Memorial. I would like to thank Zhanna Bogdanovich and Natalia Leshchenko for translating sections of the book into Russian; Irina Flige, Alyona Kozlova and Irina Ostrovskaia for checking the final drafts; Leo Viprinski for his generous and thoughtful assistance with the Slavin sections; and Aleksei Simonov, not just for correcting the English text on the Laskins and the Simonovs, but for showing me the need to think again about the enigma of ‘K.M.’

Most of the materials generated by the research project of The Whisperers are available on line (http://www.orlandofiges.com). Here you will find the main family archives together with the transcripts and sound extracts of the interviews. Some of the materials have been translated into English. Without the website, many of these archives would have been lost when their owners passed away, for the younger generation in Russia has little interest in the Soviet past and not much storage space to keep such things. I would like to thank Emma Beer, Aibek Baratov and Ding Zhang for their help in the design and construction of the website. With the support of Jerry Kuehl, Emma also took the lead in trying to get interest going in a video project, the aim of which was to create a film archive of interviews with the heroes of The Whisperers delivered via streaming from the website.

Working on this project has involved a lot of travelling, months spent away from my family, Stephanie, Lydia and Alice, who have put up with a lot but will now see, I hope, that it was worthwhile. Through their love and support they have reminded me of the meaning of a family.

I must thank my friend Robert (Lord) Skidelsky for his generous hospitality in Moscow, and Aleksei Iurasovsky for being such a good landlord. I would also like to thank Elena (Helen) Volkonskaia for inviting me to stay in her lovely home in Tuscany, where much of the second draft was written in the summer of 2006.

As a writer, I am blessed with wonderful support. My agent Deborah Rogers has been as kind and passionate as ever in her efforts on my behalf, and Melanie Jackson, in the United States, has also helped in many ways. Simon Winder at Penguin and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan are a dream editorial team for any writer. In their different ways – Simon inspiring with enthusiastic comments and encouragement, Sara editing the typescript line by line with extraordinary passion and attention to detail – they have each had an immense influence on the writing of this book. I owe a huge debt to them both. I would also like to thank David Watson for his copy-editing, Merle Read for checking the transliteration of the Russian names, Alan Gilliland for drawing the floorplans and Donald Winchester for extra editorial support. I am also grateful to Andrei Bobrov at the ITAR-TASS Photo Agency for helping to track down some elusive photographs.

I would like to thank the scholars who have helped me with points of detail and directed me to sources that I did not know: Valerii Golofast, Katerina Gerasimova, Stephen Wheatcroft, Catriona Kelly, Boris Kolonitsky, Jonathan Haslam, Daniel Beer and Daniel Pick. I also owe a debt to Rob Perks, who shared his wisdom on the challenges of oral history. Jennifer Davis gave me good advice on the legal aspects of the contracts with Memorial, for which many thanks. Raj Chandarvarkar gave loyal support and help in countless ways. I only wish he was alive to discuss the book with me.

Finally, I would like to thank my old friend and colleague, Hiroaki Kuromiya, one of the finest and most careful historians of the Stalin period, who read the manuscript with strict instructions to challenge anything that could be construed as a flaw. Any errors that remain are mine.

London

April 2007