Working on this project has involved a lot of travelling, months spent away from my family, Stephanie, Lydia and Alice, who have put up with a lot but will now see, I hope, that it was worthwhile. Through their love and support they have reminded me of the meaning of a family.
I must thank my friend Robert (Lord) Skidelsky for his generous hospitality in Moscow, and Aleksei Iurasovsky for being such a good landlord. I would also like to thank Elena (Helen) Volkonskaia for inviting me to stay in her lovely home in Tuscany, where much of the second draft was written in the summer of 2006.
As a writer, I am blessed with wonderful support. My agent Deborah Rogers has been as kind and passionate as ever in her efforts on my behalf, and Melanie Jackson, in the United States, has also helped in many ways. Simon Winder at Penguin and Sara Bershtel at Metropolitan are a dream editorial team for any writer. In their different ways – Simon inspiring with enthusiastic comments and encouragement, Sara editing the typescript line by line with extraordinary passion and attention to detail – they have each had an immense influence on the writing of this book. I owe a huge debt to them both. I would also like to thank David Watson for his copy-editing, Merle Read for checking the transliteration of the Russian names, Alan Gilliland for drawing the floorplans and Donald Winchester for extra editorial support. I am also grateful to Andrei Bobrov at the ITAR-TASS Photo Agency for helping to track down some elusive photographs.
I would like to thank the scholars who have helped me with points of detail and directed me to sources that I did not know: Valerii Golofast, Katerina Gerasimova, Stephen Wheatcroft, Catriona Kelly, Boris Kolonitsky, Jonathan Haslam, Daniel Beer and Daniel Pick. I also owe a debt to Rob Perks, who shared his wisdom on the challenges of oral history. Jennifer Davis gave me good advice on the legal aspects of the contracts with Memorial, for which many thanks. Raj Chandarvarkar gave loyal support and help in countless ways. I only wish he was alive to discuss the book with me.
Finally, I would like to thank my old friend and colleague, Hiroaki Kuromiya, one of the finest and most careful historians of the Stalin period, who read the manuscript with strict instructions to challenge anything that could be construed as a flaw. Any errors that remain are mine.
London
April 2007
Permissions
With the following exceptions (listed by the pages on which they appear), all the photographs are reproduced with the permission of their owners from private family archives and the archives of Memorial (MM, MP, MSP): GARF: 21; GMPIR: 330; RGAE: 23, 225, 226; RGALI: 2, 61, 135, 140, 199, 403, 407, 409, 495, 507, 617; TASS: 229, 232, 375, 500; TsGAKFD: 152, 486, 504, 524, 527, 609, 627.
Notes
Introduction
1. MSP, f. 3, op. 14, d. 2, l. 31; d. 3, ll. 18–19.
2. I have based my estimate on the figures in M. Ellman, ‘Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 54, no. 7 (November 2002), pp. 1151–72. Ellman gives a figure of 18.75 million Gulag sentences between 1934 and 1953, but many Gulag prisoners served more than one sentence in this period. He also gives the following figures for these years: at least 1 million executions; 2 million people in the labour army and other units of forced labour subordinated to the Gulag; 5 million people among the deported nationalities. According to the most reliable estimates, about 10 million people were repressed as ‘kulaks’ after 1928. That gives a total of 36.5 million people; allowing for the duplication of Gulag sentences, an overall figure of 25 million people is reasonable and probably an underestimate.
3. Interview with Elena Dombrovskaia, Moscow, January 2003.
4. MP, f. 4, op. 25, d. 2, ll. 9– 10.
5. M. Gefter, ‘V predchuvstvii proshlogo’, Vek XX i mir, 1990, no. 9, p. 29.
6. See e.g. V. Kaverin, Epilog: Memuary (Moscow, 1989); K. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia (Moscow, 1990).
7. The literature is enormous, but see e.g. A. Barmine, One Who Survived (New York, 1945); V. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (London, 1947); A. Gorbatov, Years off My Life (London, 1964); N. Kaminskaya, Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defence Attorney (New York, 1982); N. Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope (London, 1989); same author, Hope Abandoned (London, 1990); E. Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (New York, 1967); same author, Within the Whirlwind (New York, 1981); L. Bogoraz, ‘Iz vospominanii’, Minuvshee, vol. 2 (Paris, 1986); L. Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London, 1979); same author, The Education of a True Believer (London, 1980); T. Aksakova-Sivers, Semeinaia khronika, 2 vols. (Paris, 1988); Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren: Recollections of a Trotskyist Who Survived the Stalin Terror (New Jersey, 1995).
8. A. Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), pp. 119–46.
9. Again the literature is voluminous, but among the more interesting are: O. Adamova-Sliuzberg, Put’ (Moscow, 1993); A. Raikin, Vospominaniia (St Petersburg, 1993); I. Diakonov, Kniga vospominanii (St Petersburg, 1995); Iu. Liuba, Vospominaniia (St Petersburg, 1998); I. Shikheeva-Gaister, Semeinaia khronika vremen kul’ta lichnosti (1925–53 gg.) (Moscow, 1998); I. Dudareva, Proshloe vsegda s nami: vospominaniia (St Petersburg, 1998); E. Evangulova, Krestnyi put’ (St Petersburg, 2000); K. Atarova, Vcherashnyi den’: vokrug sem’i Atarovykh-Dal’tsevykh: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2001); L. El’iashova, My ukhodim, my ostaemsia. Kniga 1: Dedy, ottsy (St Petersburg, 2001); N. Iudkovskii, Rekviem dvum semeistvam: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2002); E. Vlasova, Domashnyi al’bom: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2002); P. Kodzaev, Vospominaniia reabilitirovannogo spetspereselentsa (Vladikavkaz, 2002); E. Liusin, Pis’mo-vospominaniia o prozhitykh godakh (Kaluga, 2002); A. Bovin, XXvek kak zhizn’: vospominaniia (Moscow, 2003). See also: I. Paperno, ‘Personal Accounts of the Soviet Experience’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 3, no. 4 (Autumn 2002), pp. 577–610.
10.See e.g. S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (New York, 1994); S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge, 1997); S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1997).
11. See e.g., N. Kosterina, Dnevnik (Moscow, 1964); O. Berggol’ts, ‘Bezumstvo predannosti: iz dnevnikov Ol’gi Berggol’ts’, Vremia i my, 1980, no. 57, pp. 270–85; A. Mar’ian, Gody moi, kak soldaty: dnevnik sel’skogo aktivista, 1925–1953 gg. (Kishinev, 1987); M. Prishvin, Dnevniki (Moscow, 1990); E. Bulgakova, Dnevnik Eleny
