Nadezhda enrolled as a student at the Medical Institute in Leningrad and went on to become a physician. It was only shortly before her mother’s death in 1992 that Nadezhda found out about her father’s multiple arrests and the eight years he had spent in various prisons, labour camps and ‘special settlements’. She saw her father’s name in the newspaper, along with the names of her grandfather and her uncle, in a list of former political prisoners, posthumously rehabilitated after the collapse of the Soviet regime. Nadezhda showed the list to her mother, who at first said: ‘It was all so long ago. Why drag all that up again?’ But after Nadezhda insisted, her mother told her everything. Her parents had wanted to protect her by not putting her in a position where she would feel obliged to declare her spoilt biography. ‘Throughout my life, whenever I was asked to complete a questionnaire,’ explains Nadezhda,
I was able to write ‘No’ in the section where they asked if I had any relatives who had been repressed, and because I did not know about my father, I was able to say that with a clear conscience, without any of the anxiety which I would have felt if I had been forced to lie. I’m sure that’s why I always got away with it.
Her parents had maintained their silence even after 1956; they still thought it was too dangerous to tell her about their past, in case she told her friends, or the political circumstances changed. As a consequence, until the age of sixty-three, Nadezhda, as she herself admits, had little concern for the victims of the Stalinist regime – an indifference that was no doubt shared by other Soviet citizens whose lives were unaffected directly by the terror. Reflecting on her life in the 1930s and 1940s, Nadezhda recalls:
I had heard about the repressions, but they made no impression on me whatsoever. In 1946, for example, there were mass arrests in the neighbouring village in Penza, but somehow they passed me by, I did not understand or even try to understand what was going on… Today I find it hard to explain this – that these events took place in parallel with my own life, but didn’t affect me in the least. Somehow I managed to avoid it all.9
The grave of Nadezhda’s father, Ignatii Maksimov, Penza, 1994
Tamara Trubina did not find out for over fifty years what had happened to her father. All her mother, Kapitolina, told her was that he had disappeared in the Far East, where he had gone as a voluntary worker on various construction sites. Kapitolina had met Konstantin, an engineer, in 1935, when she, a young doctor, was sent by the Komsomol to work in the Gulag administration in Sychan, a small town near Vladivostok, where he was working as a penal labourer on a building site attached to the Gulag. In 1938, Konstantin was rearrested. Kapitolina had no idea where her husband was. She knew only that he had been sent to a labour camp somewhere in the Dalstroi Gulag network in north-east Siberia. After leaving the young Tamara with her mother in Perm, Kapitolina returned to work as a doctor in the labour camps of Kolyma. Because her marriage to Konstantin had not been registered and she had kept her maiden name, she was able to conceal her spoilt biography for several years. Eventually the commandant of the Gulag section where she worked found out about Konstantin, but the need for doctors in the camps was so acute that he kept Kapitolina’s secret and protected her. For thirty years, Kapitolina continued to work as a doctor for the NKVD, and then the MVD, rising to become a major in the Medical Division of the KGB, before her retirement in 1965. Until 1956, she never gave up hope that in the course of her travels around the labour camps of Kolyma she might discover Konstantin, or find out something about him. By helping other prisoners like him, she felt, at least, as she herself expressed it, that she was maintaining a link indirectly with her lost husband. Then, in 1956, she was told the truth: Konstantin had been executed in November 1938.
For nearly twenty years, Kapitolina had lived in constant fear that her colleagues would find out that her husband was an ‘enemy of the people’. She was afraid to speak of Konstantin even with her family. So the revelation that he had been shot – which she took as evidence that he may well have been guilty of a serious crime – made her even more withdrawn and silent about him. She said nothing to her daughter, who asked about her father with increasing frequency. ‘Mama never spoke about my father,’ recalls Tamara.
She kept all his letters [from the 1930s] and some telegrams, but she never showed them to me. She always steered the conversation on to other subjects. She would say, ‘I don’t know what he did.’ The most she would say was, ‘Perhaps his tongue got him into trouble.’
After her mother’s death, in 1992, Tamara was advised by her uncle, a senior official in the KGB, to write to his police colleagues in Vladivostok and ask for information about Konstantin. The reply she received informed her that her father had been shot in 1938 on charges of belonging to a ‘Trotskyist organization’, but it made no mention of his imprisonment in any labour camp. So she continued to believe that Konstantin was a voluntary worker in the Far East, as her mother had told her, and that he had fallen out of favour with the Soviet authorities only during 1938. It was only in 2004, when Tamara was interviewed in Perm in connection with this book, that she learned the whole story. Shown the documents which proved that her father was a long-term prisoner in the Gulag, she at first refused to believe them and insisted that there must be a mistake. Mentally she was not prepared to see herself as a ‘victim of repression’ in the Soviet system where she had enjoyed a successful career as a teacher and perceived herself as a member of the Soviet establishment. Perhaps, Tamara acknowledged, she owed her success to her mother’s silences: had she known the truth about her father, she might well have hesitated to make a career for herself.10
The suppression of traumatic memories has been widely noted as a psychic self-defence for victims of repression in all totalitarian regimes, but in the Soviet Union there were special reasons for Stalin’s victims to forget about the past. For one thing, nobody was sure whether Khrushchev’s thaw would last. It was possible that it would soon be followed by a return to repression; and, as it turned out, the thaw was brief and limited. Throughout the Khrushchev period, the regime made it clear that it was not prepared to tolerate any discussion of the Stalinist repressions that might lead to criticism of the Soviet system as a whole. Even at the height of the Khrushchev thaw in the early 1960s – a time when Stalin’s body was removed from Lenin’s Mausoleum, when Stalinist hardliners such as Kaganovich, Molotov and Malenkov were expelled from the Party, and when the perception of the Stalinist regime was changed for good by the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s searing Gulag tale
In 1964, Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, and the relatively liberal climate of the thaw came to an abrupt end. Censorship was tightened. Stalin’s reputation as a ‘great war leader’ was resurrected for the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet victory, when a bust of the dictator appeared by his grave near the Kremlin Wall. Brezhnev clamped down on the ‘dissidents’, who were first organized by the protest movement against the show trial of the samizdat writers Iulii Daniel and Andrei Siniavsky in February 1966. The persecution of the dissidents was a powerful deterrent against the discussion of Stalin’s crimes. Millions of people whose memory of the Stalinist regime might have made them think or speak more critically about the Soviet system pulled back, afraid of giving the impression that they sympathized with the dissidents, whose references to Stalin’s crimes were a form of opposition to the Brezhnevite regime. People again suppressed their memories – they refused to talk about the past – and conformed outwardly to the loyal and silent Soviet majority.
Among Stalin’s former prisoners the threat of rearrest was real enough to reinforce this silence for several decades after 1956. The KGB may have been defanged by the ending of the Terror, but it still had access to a huge range of draconian punishments, and its powers of surveillance, which reached everywhere, instilled fear in anyone who dared to think or speak or act in ways that could be seen as anti-Soviet.
Inna Gaister was working as an engineer in the Tsvetmetavtomatika Laboratories in Moscow in 1977 when she was called to the telephone to speak to an operative from the KGB who asked her to come in to the Lubianka. ‘Naturally, I began to get the shakes,’ recalls Inna. ‘I could not think at all.’ Her mind raced back to her arrest in April 1949, when she had been summoned in a similar manner in the midst of her thesis defence at Moscow University; to the arrest of her sister in June 1949; and to the arrest of both her parents forty years before, in 1937, when Inna had been twelve. Inna responded that she was in the middle of an experiment and so couldn’t come in straight away. The KGB official told her that he would ring again in half an hour. Inna frantically began to call her friends, both to warn them that they might be summoned too and to let them know where she was going, in case she did not return. When the KGB rang back, Inna once again refused to go to the Lubianka, so the operative began to question her about her acquaintance with Lev Kopelev, the former Gulag
