under threat. For the moment, Khrushchev held back the evidence he had gathered against Malenkov – he still needed his support in the collective leadership – but in the early months of 1955, as Khrushchev launched his bid for the control of the Party, he saw to it that Malenkov was charged with ‘moral responsibility’ for the Leningrad Affair and demoted from Chairman of the Council of Ministers to Minister of Electrification.
Khrushchev used the exposure of Stalin’s crimes to strengthen his position and undermine his rivals in the leadership (what he did to Malenkov in 1955 he would do to Kaganovich, Molotov and Voroshilov at the Party Congress in 1961). It was a dangerous game to play, because Khrushchev had himself been deeply implicated in the mass repressions of the 1930s, first as the Moscow Party boss in 1935–8, and then as Party chief of Ukraine, when he oversaw the arrest of at least a quarter of a million people. But Khrushchev was able to limit the Procurators’ activities if they went against his own interests. The Stalin Factory Affair was one such example. Because Khrushchev was involved, there were long delays in the review of prisoners’ appeals that might throw up incriminating evidence against him. In June 1954, Sonia Laskina was promised a response to her appeal by August; in August she was told that it would be done by September; in September this became October, then November; and then in February 1955, she heard that it would be completed by the end of March. The case was finally considered in September 1955.5
Like the other Party leaders, Khrushchev was afraid of what might happen if all of Stalin’s victims were suddenly released. ‘We were scared,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘We were afraid that the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which would drown us all.’ According to Mikoian, a Politburo member for over thirty years, it would have been politically impossible for all the ‘enemies of the people’ to be declared innocent at once, because that would make it clear that ‘the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters’. The Party leadership had no real interest in speeding up the release of political prisoners. Nor did the officials of the Procuracy, who were reluctant to admit mistakes in the prosecution of politicals, let alone to confess their part in the fabrication of evidence against them during Stalin’s terror. In 1954, serving the interests of both institutions, the staff of the Soviet Procuracy was cut by two-thirds, thereby prolonging the procedural delays.6
The Laskin family at their Ilinskoe dacha near Moscow, 1956.
From left: Zhenia, Berta, Sonia, Samuil, Fania
The Laskin family was one of the lucky ones. They were able to return to the old rhythms of domestic life, and in many ways they became even closer after Sonia came back from the labour camps. Sonia herself was invited to take up her old job at the Stalin Factory. After months of writing applications to the Procuracy and battling with officials in Soviet offices, she received a certificate of rehabilitation, clearing her of all the charges against her, restoring her civil rights and entitling her to a small sum in compensation for the five years she had wasted in the labour camp. Sonia was given a small room in a communal apartment on the outskirts of Moscow, which was used by various relatives, as were all the places where the Laskins lived. The famous Laskin suppers at Zubov Square carried on as usual on Sunday evenings. The apartment was always full of family and friends, including some, like the poet Lugovskoi, Simonov’s old teacher at the Literary Institute, who became part of the extended clan. Aleksei, who was already sixteen when Sonia returned, recalls the atmosphere of the Laskin home:
It was a place of extraordinary warmth and hospitality governed by the outlook of my grandfather [Samuil Laskin]. He ran it by this rule: anyone who came into our home was welcomed as a member of the family. Once I tried to test this rule: for several Sundays in a row I brought home to dinner various girls I had picked up on the streets. No one said a word, not even my mother, who was morally very strict, because those were Samuil’s rules.7
The return of relatives from the labour camps drew many families closer. Years of separation brought home the joys of domestic life even to those Bolsheviks who had once lived entirely for politics. Before her arrest in 1937, Ruth Bonner had taken little interest in the upbringing of her two children. She was totally committed to her work in the Party. The letters she wrote to her teenage daughter Elena from ALZhIR were cold and loveless, with instructions for her to study hard, ‘help your grandmother’, and ‘be a model Komsomol’. Her main concern was to petition Mikoian (an old friend) to save her husband, who had been arrested in the purge of the Comintern in 1937, insisting in her letters that he ‘had always been faithful to the Party’. Released in 1946, Ruth was not allowed to return to Leningrad, so she settled in Luga, 135 kilometres to the south, where, with the help of Elena’s friends, young poets, she got a job as a housemother at the Writers’ Union Pioneer camp. Meanwhile, Elena had returned to Leningrad from the army, having spent the war years serving as a military nurse, and was studying pediatrics at the Medical Institute. She shared a room with several girlfriends (including Ida Slavina) and, during the winter, when the Pioneer camp was closed, Ruth would come to visit her. At first their relations were tense. ‘I could tell that she didn’t share our post-war jollity and didn’t approve of our way of life,’ recalls Elena in her memoirs.
Now I understand that each of us had her own experiences. She had the death of her husband, prison, and camp. I had my own losses and, as it seemed then, a completely different life. Neither of us knew how to be open with the other, and I didn’t want that. I was annoyed by the way Mama still treated me like the fourteen- year-old she had left, and her questions drove me crazy: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘When will you be back?’
Reflecting on these years in interview, Elena admits: ‘I often wished my mother would just go to hell. I couldn’t kick her out, but I could drop out of the institute and run away somewhere, anywhere to earn a living, as long as I was free from her.’ After the birth of Elena’s daughter Tania in 1950, there was a dramatic change in Ruth’s priorities. ‘We found a common focus – the upbringing of her granddaughter – and that brought us closer,’ recalls Elena. From that moment, Ruth ceased to have any real interest in politics. Although she rejoined the Party after her return to Leningrad and her rehabilitation in 1954, she never played an active role and, according to Elena, remained a member ‘mainly because she was afraid for us, above all for her grandchildren’.* ‘Only the grandchildren [Tania and her brother Aleksei] mattered,’ Elena recalls. ‘It was amazing how much warmth and inner radiance she had preserved for them.’ Ruth was rediscovering the values of her own mother, Elena’s beloved grandmother Batania, who had taken charge of her grandchildren while her children dedicated themselves to their Party work. Reflecting on this transformation in her mother’s character, Elena Bonner remembers the morning of Ruth’s funeral in December 1987:
I was getting tablecloths from the cupboard, setting the tables for the wake. The first to fall on me was a heavy cloth with coloured embroidery… Under it was the pink one! Now, after innumerable washings, it merely gave off a pink tint, and Mama’s beautiful and fine mending stood out in bright pink. Could I have ever imagined that my mother, a Party worker, antibourgeois and maximalist, who never allowed herself to use a tender word to Egorka or me, would be mending tablecloths, sewing dresses for me, dressing up Tania, that she could turn into a ‘crazy’ grandmother and great-grandmother, for whom her grandchildren and great-grandchildren would be the ‘chief light in the window’, the justification for all the losses of her entire life? I couldn’t even imagine that she would come to love potted flowers on the windowsill and tend them, making them grow and live. Or that she would turn in her Party card with a certain pride and challenge. This was not a demonstration for the sake of the Party or a settling of accounts… It was simply that with that difficult, almost impossible step she fully gave herself to us, her warm, living love, which was higher and greater than abstract ideas and principles. She said almost before her death that in life you must simply live in a good and kind way.8
Families had a miraculous capacity for survival despite the enormous pressures arrayed against them during Stalin’s reign. The family emerged from the years of terror as the one stable institution in a society where virtually all the traditional mainstays of human existence – the neighbourhood community, the village and the church – had been weakened or destroyed. For many people the family represented the only relationships they could trust, the only place they felt a sense of belonging, and they went to extraordinary lengths to reunite with relatives.
Few people made quite as many sacrifices as Valentin Muravsky. He was born in 1928 to the family of a radio engineer in Leningrad. In 1937, after the arrest and execution of his father as an ‘enemy of the people’, Valentin was exiled with his sister Dina and his mother to Uzbekistan, from which they returned to Leningrad in 1940. During the war, when they were evacuated to Cherkessk, near Stavropol, the three of them were captured by the Germans and sent to work in various factories in Austria and Germany. In 1945, Dina was working at a factory near Nuremberg that was liberated by US troops. She married an American officer and emigrated to the USA. But Valentin returned to Leningrad, where he was reunited with his mother. The war had made him think more critically
