sofa which her father had brought back from Minsk, cushions, lamps and chairs, familiar to her from her childhood. When she had signed the document, the woman asked Maria to sit down with her on the sofa. ‘There is something I must tell you,’ she whispered. The woman told Maria that, shortly after his arrest, her husband had written her a letter from the labour camp, which she had destroyed out of fear. He had written to tell her that during his interrogation they had knocked out all his teeth, that he did not think he would return from the labour camp, and that she should not wait for him but should marry someone else. Her husband never returned from the labour camps. She was telling Maria this, she explained, because she wanted her to understand that she had suffered too and that she was sorry about what had happened to her parents.62
Iurii Shtakelberg was arrested in 1948 on charges of belonging to a group of ‘Jewish nationalist students’ at Leningrad University. It was claimed that the group was organized and financed by a German baron as a ‘spy- ring’ against the Soviet Union. Iurii was accused of trying to set up a secret printing press to spread anti-Soviet propaganda in the university. The charges had no foundation. They were based entirely on a made-up story and denunciation signed by four of his fellow students at the university, who, it seems, were motivated largely by their xenophobia and had picked on Shtakelberg because of his foreign name (it is also possible that they knew about the arrest of Iurii’s father for ‘disseminating German propaganda’ in December 1941). In March 1949, Iurii was sentenced by a court in Leningrad to twenty-five years of hard labour. He was sent to the Bamlag camp (where his father had perished in 1942) and put to work building bridges for the railway. In 1956, he was seriously injured from a fall and released as an invalid. At first he lived in Luga and then finally he returned to Leningrad, taking a job in the Public Library. When Iurii was invited by the KGB to look at the records of his trial, he saw the names of his fellow students who had reported him. He paid a visit to each one in turn. ‘They all understood that I knew what they had done,’ recalls Iurii.
One woman told me that it made no difference that I had returned, that it changed nothing, because I had been a bastard then, and I was a bastard now… She said that I should have been shot. One of the men – the one who had always been a provocateur, and a stupid one at that – took me to his home and in the entrance showed me a large bundle of paper. It was the sort of consignment that was sometimes sold in the big shops. He said: ‘If you want some, help yourself. Perhaps now’s the time to start your printing press.’ I laughed it off, but it sent a shiver down my spine. I thought of telling him that the paper was of no use for a printing press because it was cut too small, but I said nothing.63
Ibragim Izmail-Zade was a senior professor of medicine and a departmental head at the Institute of Medicine in Baku at the time of his arrest, in 1938, on charges of belonging to an ‘anti-Soviet group of Azerbaijani nationalists’. After his release from the Kolyma camps, he returned to Baku, where he took up a junior position in the same institute. Instead of the cutting-edge research he had done in the 1930s, he was now employed in routine clinical work. During the trial of M. D. Bagirov, the former Party boss of Azerbaijan, in 1955, Ibragim appeared as a witness for the prosecution, in which capacity he was allowed to look at his own file from 1938, when Bagirov had led the terror campaign in Baku. Ibragim discovered that he had been denounced by his favourite student, who had since gone on to become the head of his department at the institute. While Ibragim was in Kolyma, the former student had often visited his wife and daughter, who treated him as a member of the family. The old student was noticeably cooler in his behaviour after Ibragim’s return, rarely coming to the house, and never in the evening, when he would have been obliged to eat or drink with him. After his discovery of the denunciation, Ibragim and his family were forced to see the former student several times, and while they never spoke to him about his actions, it was clear that the Izmail-Zades now knew of the betrayal. One day the political director of the institute appeared at the Izmail-Zade house. He wanted Ibragim to sign a document stating that his family had no grievance against the former student, and that they would remain on friendly terms. Ibragim refused to sign. He had to be restrained from throwing the official out on the street. According to his daughter, Ibragim was crushed by the betrayal. He felt humiliated at being forced to work beneath someone who, he felt, was hardly qualified. Being asked to sign the document had been the final straw.64
In 1953, Kolia Kuzmin, the former leader of the Komsomol in Obukhovo, who had denounced the Golovins as ‘kulaks’ during the collectivization campaign of 1930, came to live in Pestovo, the small town near Vologda, where the Golovins had settled after their return from exile in Siberia. Before his denunciation of the Golovins, Kolia had often been a guest in their house. He had even been employed in the leather workshop of Nikolai Golovin, who had taken pity on the teenage boy, because he came from the poorest family in the village. Nikolai and his wife Yevdokiia were religious believers. When Kolia came to visit them shortly after Stalin’s death and asked for their forgiveness, not just for his denunciation but for his part in the murder of Nikolai’s brother, they not only forgave him but invited him to come and live with them in Pestovo. Their daughter Antonina, who was then working as a doctor in Kolpino, near Leningrad, took exception to her parents’ generosity and tried to persuade them to change their minds. ‘He killed Ivan [Nikolai’s brother] and destroyed our family. How can one forgive a man for that?’ she reasoned. But Yevdokiia believed that ‘a truly Christian person should forgive his enemies’. Kolia settled in a house next door to the Golovins. He was ashamed of his actions in the past and tried to make amends by running errands for the Golovins. On Saturdays he would go with Nikolai to the public baths; on Sundays he would go with both of them to church. In 1955, Yevdokiia died, followed three years later by Nikolai, and in 1970 by Kolia Kuzmin. They are all buried in the same churchyard in Pestovo.65
Many former prisoners were surprisingly forgiving towards the people who had informed on them. This inclination to forgive was seldom rooted in religious attitudes, as it was with the Golovins, but it was often based on the understanding, which was shared by everyone who had experienced the prisons and the camps of the Gulag system, that virtually any citizen, no matter how good they might be in normal circumstances, could be turned into an informer by pressure from the NKVD. The journalist Irina Sherbakova recalls a meeting of the Moscow Memorial Society (established to represent the victims of repression) during the late 1980s:
one woman, who had been arrested in about 1939, said to me in a completely calm voice: ‘Over there is the man who informed on me.’ And she greeted him quite normally. Catching my perplexed expression, she explained: ‘Of course we were just eighteen then, his parents were Old Bolsheviks who were repressed, and they [the NKVD] tried to recruit me too. And of course he himself was repressed later on.’ I felt that what she said was motivated, not by a lack of concern for the past or a desire to forget it, but by the realization of the shameful things the system had done to people.66
That realization was certainly more likely to develop in the 1980s, when painful memories had perhaps softened over time, and the victims of repression, informed by history, had arrived at a more objective understanding of the Soviet system. But the tendency to refrain from the condemnation of individuals was already noted in the 1950s, when Soviet emigres, apparently, were not hostile to ordinary Party functionaries, because they understood that they were really powerless and perhaps themselves victims of the same system.67
Not surprisingly, the return of Stalin’s prisoners provoked great fear in the people who had helped to send them to the camps. ‘All the murderers, provocateurs and informers had one feature in common,’ recalls Nadezhda Mandelshtam: they never thought that their victims might return one day:
They thought that everybody sent to the next world or to the camps had been eliminated once and for all. It never entered their heads that these ghosts might rise up and call their grave-diggers to account. During the period of rehabilitations, therefore, they were utterly panic-stricken. They thought that time had gone into reverse and that those they had dubbed ‘camp dust’ had suddenly once more taken on flesh and reassumed their names. They were seized by terror.
One ‘wretched woman informer’ was constantly summoned to the Prosecutor’s office to retract testimony she had given against the living and the dead. After every session, recalls Mandelshtam, she would run to the families of those she had denounced and plead, ‘as God was her witness’, that she had ‘never said anything bad’ about them, and that ‘her only reason for going to the Prosecutor’s office now was to say good things about all the dead people so they would be cleared as soon as possible’. Mandelshtam concluded that
the woman had never had anything remotely resembling a conscience, but this was more than she could stand, and she had a stroke that left her paralysed. She must at some moment have got so scared that she really
