Where are you, brother?
On what Belomorkanal?
(‘Brothers’, 1933)
In 1935, Ivan went to visit Aleksandr in Smolensk. Having fled the ‘special settlement’, Ivan had spent the past three years living on the run, taking casual jobs in Moscow and other industrial towns, but he yearned to see his native town and he felt the time had come to let his brother know what had happened to his family. The brothers had two brief meetings, at which Aleksandr warned his brother to leave Smolensk: ‘There is nothing for you here,’ he told Ivan. ‘You will find nothing but unpleasantness. For me, by contrast, it is important to live here, where people know me well!’83
At the time, Ivan was full of bitterness towards his brother. But in later years he came to understand the pressures on Aleksandr, his need to remain in a place where people knew and respected him, and where his success offered some protection. Reflecting on his brother’s choices, Ivan wrote with compassion:
I dare say that my visit stirred up guilt feelings and remorse in him. He couldn’t have forgotten the letters he wrote to us in exile, nor his meeting with father at the House of Soviets. I felt sorry for my brother. Whether I liked it or not, I had to recognize that he was a sincere member of the Komsomol and had been so since the 1920s. I now think that Aleksandr saw the revolutionary violence that swept away our parents, brothers and sisters, although unjust and mistaken, as a kind of test, to see if he could prove himself as a true member of the Komsomol. Maybe there was nobody he had to prove this to – maybe he just had to prove it to himself. No doubt he rationalized it in this way: ‘Every kulak is somebody’s father, and his children someone’s brothers and sisters. What makes my family any different? Be brave and strong, don’t give in to abstract humanitarianism and other feelings outside class interests.’ This was his logic: if you support collectivization, that means you support the liquidation of the kulaks as a class, and you do not have the moral right to ask for an exception for your own father. It is possible that in his heart Aleksandr mourned for his family, but it was just one of many kulak families.84
5
The ‘great break’ of 1928–32 destroyed old ties and loyalties uniting families and communities. It gave birth to a new kind of society in which people were defined by their relation to the state. In this system social class was everything; the state promoted ‘proletarians’ and repressed the ‘bourgeoisie’. But class was not a fixed or rigid category. As millions of people left their homes, changed their jobs or moved around the country, it was relatively easy to change or reinvent one’s social class. People learned to fashion for themselves a class identity that would help them advance. They became clever at concealing or disguising impure social origins, and at dressing up their own biographies to make them seem more ‘proletarian’.
The notion of ‘working on the self’ was commonplace among the Bolsheviks. It was central to the Bolshevik idea of creating a higher type of human personality (the New Soviet Man) by purging from oneself the ‘petty-bourgeois’ and individualistic impulses inherited from the old society. As one Party leader wrote in 1929: ‘We are all people of the past with all the drawbacks from the past, and a great deal of work should be done on all of us. We must all work on ourselves.’85 At the same time, the ability of people to change and manipulate their class identity was a cause of great concern to the Party leadership.86 It was widely feared that the ‘proletariat’ – the imagined social base of the dictatorship – would become ‘diluted’ by the mass influx of the ruined peasantry and other ‘petty-bourgeois types’ (‘kulaks’, traders, priests, etc.) into the towns; that the Party would be swamped by ‘self-seekers’ and adventurers who had managed to conceal their impure social origins.
There were lots of stories about such impostors in the Soviet press. The most famous was Vladimir Gromov, who in 1935 was sentenced to ten years of penal labour on the White Sea Canal for assuming the identity of a skilled engineer and prize-winning architect. Gromov had used forged papers to get high-paid jobs and a prestigious Moscow flat. He even managed to persuade the People’s Commissar for Supply, Anastas Mikoian, to give him an advance of a million roubles.87 The concern with impostors betrayed a profound anxiety within the Party leadership. It influenced the culture of the purge, whose violent rhetoric of denunication was based on the rationale of exposing the true identity of ‘hidden enemies’. Throughout the 1930s the Party leadership encouraged the popular belief that colleagues, neighbours, even friends and relatives, might not be what they appeared to be – a belief that did much to poison personal relationships and fuel the mass terror of 1937–8. ‘Look at what those enemies of the people are like,’ Elena Bonner’s younger brother said on the arrest of their father. ‘Some of them even pretend to be fathers.’88
As with collectivization, the launching of the Five Year Plan was accompanied by a massive social purge of ‘class enemies’ and other ‘alien elements’ to remove all potential opposition and dissent. With the introduction of the passport system, the police was instructed to step up its campaign to exclude from the towns the ‘socially impure’ – ‘kulaks’, priests, merchants, criminals, ‘parasites’ and prostitutes, gypsies and other ethnic groups (Finns, Koreans, Volga Germans, and so on).89 Fear of social exclusion drove millions of people to conceal their origins. For while the ideology theoretically allowed for self-transformation, the process could be long and uncertain. Concealment could seem the more reliable, certainly the shorter, path toward social acceptance. In the chaos of the early 1930s it was relatively easy to change one’s identity by simply moving to another town, or by getting new papers. False papers could be easily obtained through bribery, or bought from forgers, who were found in every market town. But it was not even necessary to pay for a clean biography. Many people simply threw away their old papers and applied for new ones from a different Soviet, giving different information about their background and sometimes even changing their names and place of birth.90 In the provinces Soviet officials and police were notoriously inefficient and corrupt.
For women, marriage was another way to cover up their social origins. Anna Dubova was born in 1916 to a large peasant family in Smolensk province. Her father was arrested as a ‘kulak’ in 1929 and later sent to work on a construction site in Podolsk, just south of Moscow, where his wife and children moved with him. Anna’s mother got a job at a rabbit farm, while Anna enrolled at a factory school (FZU) attached to a bakery. Just when they thought that they were on their way to becoming ‘normal’ people once again, the family was denounced for concealing its ‘kulak’ origins by a friend of Anna’s sister from the Komsomol. The Dubovs were deported. They lost all their possessions and rights of residence. Anna’s parents went with their younger children to Rzhev, 200 kilometres east of Moscow, where they lived in ‘some kind of shed’ belonging to her father’s relatives. Anna fled to Moscow, where another sister, who was married to a Muscovite, gave her a place to sleep on the floor of their tiny room. Without a residence permit, living illegally, Anna nevertheless pursued her ambitions. After graduating from the FZU, she became a pastry cook at the Bolshevik Cake Factory, where she specialized in decorating cakes. Her future began to seem bright. But there was always the danger that she would lose everything if her ‘kulak’ origins and illegal status were exposed. ‘All this time,’ she said in interviews in the 1990s:
I was afraid whenever I saw a policeman, because it seemed to me that he could tell that something about me wasn’t right. And I got married just so that I could cover up my background… My husband was from the
Anna’s husband was a kind man but he drank a lot. ‘I kept dreaming, “Lord, if only I could marry a decent sort of fellow.” I lived with him, but I dreamed about a decent husband, even though I had already given birth to our daughter.’91
People forced to live this double life were haunted by the threat of exposure. ‘I was in a constant state of fear,’ recalls a former secret police colonel, an exemplary Communist, who concealed his noble origins throughout his life. ‘I thought all the time, “Suppose it is suddenly discovered who I really am.” Then all I have worked for, all I have built for myself and my family, my life, my career will suddenly collapse.’ But fear was only one of a number of contradictory impulses and emotions – passivity, the desire to withdraw, shame, inferiority – which could give rise in the same person to both a secret hatred of the Soviet regime and a will to overcome
