Many families did lead a double life. They celebrated Soviet public holidays like 1 May and 7 November (Revolution Day) and conformed to the regime’s atheist ideology, yet still observed their religious faith in the privacy of their own home. Yekaterina Olitskaia was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In the 1920s she was exiled to Riazan, where she moved in with an old woman, the widow of a former railway worker, and her daughter, a Komsomol member who worked in a paper factory. The old woman was devoutly religious but, on her daughter’s insistence, she kept her icons in a secret cupboard concealed by a curtain in the back room of the house. Her daughter was afraid that she would be fired if the Komsomol discovered that there were icons in her home. ‘On Sundays and big holidays they would draw the curtains in the evening and light the votive lamps,’ writes Olitskaia. ‘They would usually make sure to lock the doors.’ Antonina Kostikova grew up in a similarly secretive household. Her father was the peasant chairman of a village Soviet in Saratov province from 1922 to 1928, but he privately maintained his Orthodox faith. ‘Our parents were very religious,’ recalls Antonina. ‘They knew all the prayers. Father was especially devout, but he rarely spoke about religion, only when at home at night. He never let us [his three children] see him pray. He told us that we had to learn what they told us about God at school.’ Antonina’s mother, a simple peasant woman, kept an icon hidden in a compartment inside a table drawer which Antonina only found on her mother’s death in the 1970s.79
The secret observance of religious rituals occurred even in Party families. Indeed it was quite common, judging from a report by the Central Control Commission which revealed that almost half the members expelled from the Party in 1925 had been purged because of religious observance. There were numerous Party households where Christ rubbed shoulders with the Communist ideal, and Lenin’s portrait was displayed together with the family icons in the ‘red’ or ‘holy’ corner of the living room.80
The nanny, another carrier of traditional Russian values within the Soviet family, was a natural ally of the grandmother. Nannies were employed by many urban families, especially in households where both parents worked. There was an almost limitless supply of nannies from the countryside, particularly after 1928, when millions of peasants fled into the cities to escape collectivization, and they brought with them the customs and beliefs of the peasantry.
Virtually all the Bolsheviks employed nannies to take care of their children. It was a practical necessity for most Party women, at least until the state provided universal nursery care, because they went out to work. In many Party families the nanny acted as a moral counterweight to the household’s ruling Soviet attitudes. Ironically the most senior Bolsheviks tended to employ the most expensive nannies, who generally held reactionary opinions. The Bonners, for example, had a series of nannies, including one who had worked in Count Sheremetev’s household in St Petersburg, a Baltic German (an acquaintance of Batania’s old landowner friends) who taught the children ‘good manners’, and even one who had once worked for the Imperial family.81
Peasant nanny, Fursei family (Leningrad)
Nannies could exert a profound influence on family life. In the Leningrad household of the Party activists Anna Karpitskaia and Pyotr Nizovtsev, for example, there was a peasant nanny called Masha, a devout Old Believer,* who observed her religious rituals in their home. She ate separately using her own plates and cutlery, prayed every morning and evening in her room and involved the children in the elaborate rites of her belief. Masha also practised as a healer, as she had done in her native village in the northern Russian countryside, making herbal remedies to cure the children of various illnesses. A kind and caring person, Masha earned the respect of her employers, who protected her from the Soviet authorities’ pursuit of religious activists. Her presence contributed to the rare liberal atmosphere that prevailed in this household. ‘We did not think it strange to have an Old Believer in the family,’ recalls Anna’s daughter Marksena. ‘There was no trace in our household of the militant atheism found in other Party households at that time. We were brought up to be tolerant of all religions and beliefs, although we ourselves were atheists.’82
Inna Gaister was another child of Bolsheviks who was deeply affected by the counter-values of her nanny. Inna’s father, Aron Gaister, was a senior economist in Gosplan (the State Planning Commission); her mother, Rakhil Kaplan, an economist in the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry. Both her parents came from labouring families in the Pale of Settlement, the south-west corner of the Russian Empire, where the tsar’s Jews had been forced to live. The couple met in Gomel, a town in Belarus; they joined the Party in the Civil War and in 1920 moved to Moscow, to a communal apartment. Aron studied at the Institute of Red Professors, while Rakhil worked in the Textile Workers’ Union. Like many Soviet Jews, the Gaisters invested their hopes in the programme of industrialization, which they believed would end all backwardness, inequality and exploitation in the Soviet Union. Two months after the birth of their first child, Inna, in 1925, they hired a nanny called Natasha, who moved into their new home. Natasha Ovchinnikova came from a peasant family in Riazan province, south of Moscow, whose small farm had been ruined by the Bolshevik grain requisitionings of the Civil War. During the famine of 1921 Natasha fled to the capital. She rarely spoke about her family in the Gaister home. But even at the age of eight or nine, Inna was aware that the world her nanny grew up in was very different from the one in which her parents lived. Inna noticed how Natasha prayed in church; she heard her crying in her room. She saw the poverty of her relatives from Riazan – who had also made their way to the capital and were living as illegal immigrants in a crowded barracks – when she went with her to visit them. Natasha’s niece, a girl with whom Inna liked to play, had no shoes, so Inna brought her a pair of her own and then lied that she had lost them when her parents asked about the missing shoes. Although still too young to question anything politically, Inna had already formed a tacit alliance with Natasha and her family.83
The peasant world from which these nannies came was largely dominated by the traditions of the patriarchal family. In 1926, the peasantry represented 82 per cent of the Soviet population – 120 million people (in a total population of 147 million people) dispersed in 613,000 villages and remote settlements across the Soviet Union.84 The peasantry’s attachment to individual family labour on the private household farm made it the last major bastion of individualism in Soviet Russia and, in the view of the Bolsheviks, the main social obstacle to their Communist utopia.
In some areas, especially in central Russia, urban ways were filtering down to the countryside, and literate peasant sons were displacing fathers at the head of family farms, or breaking free from extended families to set up households of their own. But elsewhere the traditions of the patriarchal peasant family remained dominant.
Antonina Golovina was born to a peasant family in 1923, the youngest of six children. Their village, Obukhovo, 800 kilometres north-east of Moscow, was an ancient settlement of wooden houses in the middle of a forest; there was a pond in the middle of the village and a large wooden church, built in the eighteenth century. The Golovins had always lived in Obukhovo (twenty of the fifty-nine households in the village were occupied by Golovins in 1929).85 Antonina’s father, Nikolai, was born in the village in 1882, and apart from the three years he had spent in the army in the First World War, he lived his whole life there. Like many villages, Obukhovo was a tightly knit community where family and kin relations played a crucial role. The peasants thought of themselves as a single ‘family’ and taught their children to address other adults in familial terms (‘aunty’, ‘uncle’, and so on). Bolshevik attempts to divide the peasantry into separate and warring social classes – the ‘kulaks’ (or the ‘rural bourgeoisie’) and the poor peasants (the so-called ‘rural proletariat’) – failed miserably in Obukhovo, as they did in much of Soviet Russia during the Civil War.
As a hard-working, sober and successful peasant from the largest village clan, Nikolai was a well- respected figure in Obukhovo. ‘He was a quiet man – he did not talk to pass the day – but worked honestly and got things done, and the peasants valued that,’ one of the villagers recalls. After his return from the First World War, Nikolai became a leader of the peasant commune in Obukhovo. Governed by an assembly of its leading farmers, the peasant commune was an ancient institution, set up under serfdom, which regulated virtually every aspect of village and agrarian life. Its powers of self-government had been considerably broadened by the Emancipation of the serfs
