Olga Adamova-Sliuzberg applied for rehabilitation for herself and her husband in 1954. She waited for two years before receiving the usual certificate, in which it was stated that her case had been reviewed and the charges dropped for lack of evidence. ‘I had paid for this mistake with twenty years and forty-one days of my life,’ she writes. In compensation, she was entitled to two months’ pay for herself and her dead husband, and a further 11 roubles and 50 kopecks to compensate for the 115 roubles which had been in the possession of her husband at the time of his death. In the waiting room outside an office in the Supreme Soviet building in Moscow, where she was presented with this gift, there were twenty other women, all receiving similar certificates. Among them was an old Ukrainian, who became hysterical when she was told what her son’s life was worth:
The old Ukrainian woman began to shout: ‘I don’t need your money for my son’s blood. Keep it yourselves, murderers!’ She tore up the certificate and threw it on the floor.
The soldier who had been handing out the certificates approached her: ‘Calm down, citizen,’ he began.
But the old woman started shouting again: ‘Murderers!’ She spat in his face and began to choke in a fit of rage. A doctor ran in with two assistants and took her away. Everyone was silent and subdued. Here and there were the sounds of stifled sobs. I too found it hard to contain myself… I returned to my apartment, from which no policeman could evict me now. There was nobody at home, and I was free to weep. To weep for my husband, who perished in the cellars of the Lubianka when he was thirty-seven years old and at the height of his powers and talent; for my children, who grew up as orphans, stigmatized as the children of enemies of the people; for my parents, who died of grief; for the twenty years of torture; and for friends who never lived to be rehabilitated but lie beneath the frozen earth of Kolyma.55
Millions of people never came back from the camps. For their relatives, who were seldom told where they were or what had happened to them, the years after 1953 were a long and agonizing wait for their return, or for information about their fates. In many cases it was not until the 1980s, when ‘openness’ or glasnost became the watchword of the Soviet government, or even after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, that this wait came to an end.
Zinaida Bushueva never found out that her husband had been shot in 1938. Until her death, in 1992, she did not know whether he was dead, in which case she would have mourned for him, or whether he was still alive but had chosen not to return to his family, in which case she would have probably concluded that he had been guilty after all.56
Afanasia Botova continued to believe that her husband might still be alive until she died in 1981. Her husband had been arrested in 1937 at his work in the engineering workshops attached to the railway station at Perm. He was sent to Bamlag, the Gulag complex organized for the construction of the Baikal–Amur railway line, and from there to a camp near Magadan, where, as his daughter Nina was informed in 1989, he died from exhaustion in November 1940. None of this was known to Afanasia, who received a note from him in January 1941: ‘So far still alive. The temperature is minus 50 degrees.’ For forty years this tiny scrap of faded paper was enough for Afanasia to hold on to the hope that her husband would return.57
Elena Cherkesova clung to the belief that her husband was alive until she died in 1982. Her husband, Vsevolod, a geologist at the Mining Institute in Leningrad, was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to be shot in February 1938. Before his execution Vsevolod was allowed to phone his wife. He told her that they would never see each other again, but he did not say that he was about to be executed, telling her instead, as no doubt instructed by his executioners, that he had been sentenced ‘without rights to correspond’. Like millions of other relatives with loved ones in the labour camps, Elena did not understand that ‘without rights to correspond’ was Gulag code for the death sentence. After 1953, she presumed that his sentence must have ended, so she tried to track him down. She made inquiries at the MVD headquarters in Leningrad and wrote to the Soviet Procuracy in Moscow, but none of the officials would tell her anything. Shortly after her trip to the MVD headquarters, Elena was visited by a strange woman, who told her that she had been a prisoner in the same labour camp as Vsevolod and that she had seen him there a few years before. The woman encouraged Elena to believe that her husband was still alive.58
It was a common ploy of the MVD to deceive the relatives of executed prisoners in this way. Soviet officials took great care to cover up the facts of their killings. Their main concern was to hide the huge death toll of 1937–8 by claiming that the people executed in those years had died later, usually during the war years. They fabricated death certificates and informed relatives that prisoners had died from heart attacks or other illnesses when in fact they had been killed many years before.
Ida Slavina successfully appealed for the rehabilitation of her father in 1955. With the certificate of rehabilitation she received a death certificate from the registry in Leningrad which stated that her father had died of a heart attack in April 1939. Ida was puzzled because in 1945 she had been told by the Soviet authorities that her father was alive. She went to the headquarters of the MVD in Leningrad, where she was advised to trust the evidence of the death certificate. Ten years later, in 1965, when she applied for information from the KGB in Moscow, she received the same advice. Ida continued to believe this version until 1991, when she gained access to her father’s file in the KGB archives and discovered that he had been shot, only three months after his arrest, on 28 February 1938. In his file she also found an order from a KGB official in 1955, which stated that ‘for reasons of state security’ Ida should be misinformed that her father died of a heart attack in 1939.59
Irina Dudareva never gave up hope that she would find her husband after his arrest in the southern town of Azov, where he was the leader of the Party committee, on 30 August 1937. Ten years later, she had not heard anything from him, but he was due to be released, so she began to write to the MVD and to all the labour camps whose names and addresses she had collected from the relatives of other prisoners arrested in the Rostov region where she lived. Shortly afterwards she received a visit from a man, one of her husband’s former Party colleagues from Azov, who claimed that he had seen him in a labour camp, where, he said, he was alive and well. Irina went on writing to the authorities, who informed her that her husband was alive but still serving his sentence in a labour camp ‘without rights to correspond’. After 1953, she wrote with increasing frequency, assuming that her husband must surely now have been released, since she had never heard of anybody serving more than fifteen years in the labour camps; she thought she would have been told if his sentence had been extended for some reason. Finally, in 1957, Irina received a certificate stating that her husband had died from an illness in 1944. This is all Irina knew until her death in 1974. But in 1995, her daughter Galina was given access to her father’s file in the KGB archives, in which it was stated that he had been executed on the night of his arrest.60
4
‘Now those who were arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that sent these people to the camps and the one that came back.’61 With these words the poet Akhmatova anticipated the drama which unfolded as prisoners returned from the camps to confront the colleagues, neighbours, friends who had informed on them.
In 1954, Maria Budkevich came back to the communal apartment in Leningrad where she had lived with her brother and their parents until their arrest in 1937. Their two rooms had been taken over by the next-door neighbours, a married couple with three children. The wife had been on very friendly terms with the Budkeviches until the mass arrests of 1937, when she denounced them as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘foreign spies’ (Maria’s father was of Polish origin). She had even claimed that Maria’s mother was a prostitute who brought clients to the house. In 1954, the same woman, now grown old and thin with long white hair, was living in the rooms, her children having grown up and left the apartment, and her husband sent to a labour camp in 1941. Maria needed the woman to sign a document testifying to the fact that her family used to live there. She had recently received the rehabilitation of her parents, who had both been shot in 1937, and needed the document to apply for compensation for the living space and personal property which had been confiscated from the Budkeviches at the time of their arrest. The woman’s face went white when she heard Maria say her name. ‘I didn’t think you would come back,’ she said. Maria explained the purpose of her visit and reassured the woman that she had no intention of making any claim to her living space. The woman invited Maria to sit down while she read and signed the document. Maria looked around the room. She recognized her mother’s collection of ceramic pots, the leather
