The Whisperers

* At a meeting of Party workers and combine-operators in December 1935, one young combine-operator said that he would fight for the victory of socialism even though he was the son of a ‘kulak’, to which Stalin replied: ‘A son does not answer for his father.’ The press seized on this mendacious slogan and built it up into the ‘directive’ of Stalin.

* Irina never found out about his death. She continued to look for him, writing hundreds of letters to the Soviet authorities until her own death in 1974. After 1956, Irina was invited to rejoin the Party, but she refused.

* In 1941, Igor was charged again with organizing a ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracy’, this time involving children of ‘enemies of the people’, and five more years were added to his sentence. He returned to Leningrad in 1948, but was soon rearrested for ‘counterrevolutionary agitation’ and sentenced to five years (he served eight) in the Norilsk labour camp.

* Their father, Pavel Bulat, was a political economist at the Military-Political Academy in Leningrad; their mother, Nina, an engineer and geologist.

* Ida was interviewed for the BBC film The Hand of Stalin (1989).

* After the collapse of Communism, Liuba became an active member of her church and published her own book about the life of her father (L. Tetiueva, Zhizn’ pravoslavnogo sviashchennika, Perm, 2004).

* Elizaveta had no photograph of her mother until the early 1990s, when she received her mother’s file from the former KGB archives.

* After the outbreak of the war, in June 1941, prisoners who had served their sentences in the prison zone were forced to live and work in the barracks settlement. A prisoner sentenced to three years in 1938 would thus not be released from ALZhIR until 1945.

* Yevgeny was tortured and then shot by Beria himself, who at that time was the Party boss in the Georgian capital. Ketevan was the prototype of the character of Ketevan Barateli in Tengis Abuladze’s film Repentance (1984).

*According to her memoirs, published in 1998, Okunevskaia had married Gorbatov in 1937 in the hope that, as a well-known writer and Pravda journalist, he might protect her from arrest (her father, who had been arrested as a tsarist officer in 1925, was rearrested with her grandmother and sent to a labour camp in 1937, while she herself was dropped from the film she had been shooting and could not find any other acting work). For the next ten years the couple lived the luxurious lifestyle of the Soviet elite. They were always to be seen at receptions in the Kremlin, where Tatiana’s beauty attracted the attentions of NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria. In 1947, she was raped repeatedly by Beria. The event became common knowledge in the Soviet leadership. In her memoirs Okunevskaia claims that Gorbatov did nothing to protect her. He had just been promoted to the Central Committee and did not want to rock the boat. Tatiana became wild and outspoken. She drank heavily and acted indiscretely at Kremlin receptions. Afraid of her arrest, Gorbatov pleaded with his wife to try to save herself by joining the Party. But she refused. To save himself, according to Okunevskaia, Gorbatov gave evidence about his wife’s activities to the authorities. Tatiana was arrested and sentenced to ten years in the Kolyma camps for espionage (she had often been abroad and was well known for her affairs with foreign men, including Josip Tito, the Yugoslav Prime Minister). Okunevskaia’s arrest was a cause of frequent arguments in the Simonov household. In her memoirs Okunevskaia is deeply hostile towards Simonov, depicting him, like Gorbatov, as a loathsome Party careerist. Recalling her first meeting with Simonov, at Peredelkino in 1937, when she claims he tried to force himself on her, she describes the writer as ‘the most unsympathetic [of all Gorbatov’s friends], coarse and blunt, lacking graciousness, dirty and unkempt’, a description radically at odds with the cultured and respectable figure described by others at the time (T. Okunevskaia, Tat’ianin den’ (Moscow, 1998), pp. 65–6).

*The Order was not made known to the Soviet public until 1988, when it was published as part of the policy of glasnost, or openness, although it had been distributed to all units of the Soviet armed forces in 1942.

*The Russian army fought in the Carpathian mountains in the First World War.

*In the Golovin family three of Nikolai’s four sons were killed in the fighting of 1941: Ivan (then aged thirty-four), Nikolai (twenty-eight) and Anatoly (twenty-one).

*  Proportionately it is arguable that Poland suffered more, but in absolute numbers the Soviet loss of human life and property was much greater.

†  The Soviet authorities took the view that a wounded veteran who had the capacity to work was not a war invalid. It encouraged wounded veterans to find employment – to toughen up and thus recuperate – and paid only a small invalidity pension to about 3 million veterans

(B. Fieseler, ‘The War Disabled in the Soviet Union 1945–64’, paper presented at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, September 2006).

*  ‘Little [Hans] Sachs’ (from Wagner’s opera The Mastersingers of Nuremburg).

*  A reference to The Young Guard by Aleksandr Fadeyev, a semi-factual novel about an underground youth organization in