The Whisperers

say something and then would tell us, ‘The walls have ears,’ or ‘Watch your tongue,’ or some other expression… But mostly, we learned these rules instinctively. No one explained to us that what was spoken might be dangerous politically, but somehow we understood.65

Nina Iakovleva grew up in an atmosphere of silent opposition to the Soviet regime. Her mother came from a noble family in Kostroma that had fled the Bolsheviks in the Civil War; her father was a Socialist Revolutionary* who had been imprisoned after taking part in the large-scale peasant uprising against the Bolsheviks in Tambov province in 1921 (he escaped from jail and ran away to Leningrad, where he was rearrested in 1926 and sentenced to five years in the Suzdal special isolation prison camp). Growing up in the 1920s, Nina knew instinctively that she was not allowed to speak about her father to her friends at school. ‘My mother was demonstratively silent about politics,’ recalls Nina. ‘She made a declaration of her lack of interest in political affairs.’ From this silence Nina learned to hold her tongue. ‘No one laid down specific rules about what could be spoken, but there was a general feeling, an atmosphere within the family, that made it clear to us that we were not to speak about father.’ Nina also learned to mistrust everyone outside her immediate family. ‘I love no one, I love only Mama, Papa and aunt Liuba,’ she wrote to her father in 1926. ‘I only love our family. I love no one else.’66

Galina Adasinskaia was born in 1921 to a family of active oppositionists. Her father was a Socialist Revolutionary; her mother and grandmother Mensheviks (all three were arrested in 1929). In the 1920s, when it was still possible for former SRs and Mensheviks to work in the Soviet government, Galina’s parents lived a double life. Her father worked in the administration of cooperatives, an economic organization promoted by the NEP, and her mother in the Ministry of Trade, yet in private both retained their old political opinions. Galina was protected and excluded from this secret sphere of politics. She was brought up to become a ‘Soviet child’ (she joined the Pioneers and the Komsomol). ‘Politics was something that my parents did at work, or wrote about. But at home they never spoke about such things… They thought of politics as a dirty business.’67

The households Nina and Galina were brought up in may have been extreme, but the rules of silence which they learned instinctively were observed by many families. Sofia Ozemblovskaia, the daughter of the Polish nobleman who was banned from the Pioneers after being spotted at church, lived with her family in the front half of a wooden house in a village near Minsk. ‘At home we never talked about politics or anything like that,’ she remembers. ‘Father always said, “The walls have ears.” Once he even showed us how to hear our neighbours’ conversation by listening through a glass against the wall. Then we understood. From then on we too were afraid of our neighbours.’68

Liubov (Liuba) Tetiueva was born in 1923 in Cherdyn, a small town in the Urals. Her father, Aleksandr, an Orthodox priest, was arrested in 1922 and held in prison for the best part of a year. After his release he was put under pressure by OGPU (the political police) to become an informer and write reports on his own parishioners, but he refused. The Cherdyn soviet deprived the Tetiuevs of civil rights and a rationing card when rationing was introduced in 1929.* Aleksandr’s church was taken over by the ‘renovationists’ (obnovlentsy), church reformers who sought to simplify the Orthodox liturgy and who had the backing of the Soviet regime. Shortly afterwards, Aleksandr was arrested for a second time, following a denunciation by the obnovlentsy, who accused him of sowing ‘discord among believers’ (by refusing to join them). Liubov’s mother was dismissed from her job in the Cherdyn Museum, where she worked on the library catalogue, while the elder of her two brothers was expelled from his school and the Komsomol. The family depended on the earnings of Liubov’s older sister, who worked as a schoolteacher. Liubov recalls her childhood in the 1920s:

The Tetiuev family (Liubov, aged four, seated centre), Cherdyn, 1927

If my parents needed to talk about something important, they would always go outside the house and speak to one another in whispers. Sometimes they would talk with my grandmother in the yard. They never held such conversations in front of the children – never… Not once did they have an argument or talk critically about Soviet power – though they had much to criticize – not once in any case that we could hear. The one thing my mother always said to us was: ‘Don’t you lot go chattering, don’t go chattering. The less you hear the better.’ We grew up in a house of whisperers.69

4

Many families experienced a growing generation split during the 1920s: the customs and habits of the old society remained dominant in the private spaces of the home, where seniority ruled, but young people were increasingly exposed to the influence of Soviet propaganda through school, the Pioneers and the Komsomol. For the older generation the situation posed a moral dilemma: on the one hand, they wanted to pass down family traditions and beliefs to their children; on the other, they had to bring them up as Soviet citizens.

Grandparents were the main transmitters of traditional values in most families. The grandmother, in particular, played a special role, taking prime responsibility for the upbringing of the children and the running of the household, if both the parents worked, or playing an important auxiliary role, if the mother worked part-time. In the words of the poet Vladimir Kornilov, ‘It seemed that in our years there were no mothers. / There were only grandmothers.’70 The influence of the grandmother was felt in a variety of ways. By running the household, the grandmother had a direct effect on children’s manners and habits. She told the children stories of ‘the old days’ (before 1917), which in time could serve as a reference-point or counterweight to Soviet history, enabling them to question the propaganda they were fed in school. She kept alive the cultural values of the nineteenth century by reading to the children from pre- revolutionary Russian literature, little read in Soviet schools, or by taking them to the theatre, galleries or concert halls.71

Elena Bonner was brought up by her grandmother. ‘Batania, not Mama, was the centre of my life,’ she later wrote. As Party activists, Elena’s mother and father were often absent from the Bonner home. In her relationship with her grandmother Elena found the love and affection she longed for but did not receive from her parents. Batania provided a moral counterbalance to the Soviet influence of Elena’s mother and father. As a child, Elena was aware that her grandmother – a plump but ‘astonishingly beautiful’ woman with a ‘calm and imperious manner’ – inhabited a different world from the Soviet one in which her parents lived.

Batania’s friends and acquaintances rarely came to our building, where only she and the children were not Party members. But I often went with her to call on them. I saw that they lived differently – they had different dishes, different furniture. (At our house Batania was the only one with normal furniture and a few nice things…) They talked about everything differently. I felt (this impression definitely came from Papa and Mama) that they were a different sort of people – what I couldn’t tell was whether they were worse or better.

Batania Bonner with her grandchildren (from left: Zoria, Elena, Yegorka), Moscow, 1929

Batania’s conservative moral outlook was rooted in the world of the Russian-Jewish bourgeoisie. She was hard-working, strict but caring, entirely dedicated to the family. During the 1920s Batania worked as a ‘specialist’ (spets) – a much-derided but still necessary class of ‘bourgeois’ experts and technicians – in the Leningrad customs office, where she was an accountant. She earned more than Bonner’s parents on the ‘Party Maximum’. Batania had old-fashioned frugal attitudes about money and housekeeping that were a source of constant friction with the ‘Soviet regime’ Elena’s parents imposed on the household. She read a lot but ‘stubbornly refused to read contemporary literature’ and did not go, ‘on principle’, to the cinema, such was her disdain for the modern world. She had ‘nothing but scorn for the new order’, talked disaparagingly of the Party leaders and scolded her own daughter for the excesses of the Bolshevik dictatorship. When she was really angry she would say things starting with the phrase: ‘Let me remind you that before that Revolution of yours…’ After the Soviet government banned the Shrovetide holiday, the most colourful in the Orthodox calendar, Batania, who sympathized with all old customs, told her granddaughter: ‘Well, you can thank your mummy and daddy for this.’ Not surprisingly, Elena was confused by the clash of values in her family. ‘There was a colossal conflict over our education,’ she recalls in interview.