The Whisperers

*In 1989 she discovered that he had been shot in 1937.

*With the certificate of rehabilitation the Turkins received information that Aleksandr had died in a labour camp a few weeks after his arrest in 1936. He was fifty-two.

*Smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago became an international bestseller, and Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, but under pressure from the Writers’ Union, and a storm of nationalist abuse against him in the Soviet press, he was forced to refuse the prize.

* Interviewed in Moscow in 2004, Masha Simonova did not know about the existence of this letter, nor about the sentiments which it expressed.

* Zhenia worked at Moskva from 1957 to 1969, when she was sacked for ‘grave ideological errors’ (she had published Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poetry).

* The one really notable exception is Viktor Nekrasov’s In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1946), a vivid re-creation of the ordinary soldiers’ war which avoids the usual cliches about the wise leadership of the Party. Perhaps surprisingly, it won the Stalin Prize in 1946.

† Four works of fiction in this category: Simonov’s The Living and the Dead; Nekrasov’s The Second Night (1960); Okudzhava’s Good Luck, Schoolboy (1961); and Vasil Bykau’s The Dead Feel No Pain (1965).

* In the last year of his life Simonov attempted to establish a special collection of soldiers’ memoirs at the Ministry of Defence archives in Podolsk, just outside Moscow, but high-ranking army leaders were opposed to the idea (‘O popytke K. Simonova sozdat’ arkhiv voennykh memuarov’, Otechestvennye arkhivy, 1993, no. 1, pp. 63–73).

* Thousands of such memoirs may be found in the archives of the Memorial Society, which was established in towns across the Soviet Union during the late 1980s to commemorate the victims of repression and record their memories. There are also rich collections of unpublished memoirs from this period in the Archive of the Moscow Historical-Literary Society (‘Vozvrashchenie’), established in 1989; and in the Andrei Sakharov Public Centre and Museum, opened in Moscow in 1996.

* This psychological inheritance can be handed down in various ways: in parents’ anxieties and phobias, in their over-protection of children, in the expectations with which they burden them, and even in the games they play with them. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Terez Virag, who specialized in the treatment of Holocaust survivors and their children, cites the case of a mother, for example, who lived through the siege of Leningrad as a child. The mother’s two-year-old daughter would not eat Father Christmas biscuits, and would cry in protest when she was given them. As a child herself, the mother had been traumatized by stories she was told of people killing children to eat them during the siege of Leningrad. According to Virag, the mother had passed on this trauma in the form of a bath-time game she played with her daughter in which she would take the infant’s foot in her mouth and say, ‘Now I will eat you’ (T. Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies (London, 2000), p. 43).

* Aleksandr died in a climbing accident in 1991.

* It was only in the 1990s, when he did his own researches in the Penza archives, that Nikolai discovered a family secret his parents had kept from him: that they had owned a village tavern and a bakery – enough property by Soviet standards to make them members of the bourgeoisie.

* All the materials cited from the archives of Memorial were collected and organized by the research project connected to this book. Most of them are available online at http://www.orlandofiges.com, where further details of the project can be found.