The Whisperers

administrator, grew and developed and acquired new tastes in life, and the wife, crushed by the family, remained on the old level. The road of the two generations of the Soviet bureaucracy is sown thick with the tragedies of wives rejected and left behind. The same phenomenon is now to be observed in the new generation. The greatest of all crudities and cruelties are to be met perhaps in the very heights of the bureaucracy, where a very large percentage are parvenus of little culture, who consider that everything is permitted to them. Archives and memoirs will some day expose downright crimes in relation to wives, and to women in general, on the part of those evangelists of family morals and the compulsory ‘joys of motherhood’, who are, owing to their position, immune from prosecution.28

Vladimir Makhnach was born in 1903 to a poor peasant family in Uzda, 60 kilometres south of Minsk in Belarus. His mother died while giving birth to him, and his father emigrated to the USA in 1906, leaving Vladimir to be brought up by his aunt. At the age of fourteen, he ran away from home to join the Red Guards, taking part in the seizure of power in Minsk in October 1917. He spent the next four years in the Red Army and fought against the Poles, who invaded Soviet Russia in the Civil War. In 1921, Vladimir joined the Bolsheviks and began his studies at the Mogilyov Agricultural Academy, where he met and fell in love with Maria Chausova. Born in 1904, Maria was the daughter of a peasant trader in the small town of Krichev, 100 kilometres east of Mogilyov. The youngest of six sisters, and the first to study beyond secondary school, Maria graduated from the Agricultural Academy with a distinction in agronomy and economics in 1925. The couple lived together as de facto man and wife in Mogilyov (like many Soviet youths in the 1920s, they refused to register their marriage as a sign of protest against bourgeois conventions). After graduating from the Agricultural Academy, Vladimir pursued a career in research. In 1928, he went to Moscow, where he joined the Institute of Peat (then regarded by the Bolsheviks as an important source of energy) and researched a dissertation under the direction of Ivan Radchenko, the veteran Bolshevik and friend of Lenin, who was the head of the institute. Vladimir’s impeccable credentials, his proletarian origins and his enthusiasm for Stalin’s industrialization plans soon attracted the attention of the Moscow Party organization, which called him up to work with Radchenko on the development of new energy supplies for Moscow in 1932. Vladimir became the first director of the Mosgaz Trust – a newly founded industrial complex entrusted with the task of providing gas to the rapidly expanding capital.29

Maria followed Vladimir to Moscow, where she worked in the Commissariat of Agriculture as an economist until 1933, when their son Leonid was born. On Vladimir’s promotion to Mosgaz, they moved from a small room in a communal apartment to a large private flat on Sparrow Hills (renamed the Lenin Hills in 1935). They enjoyed all the privileges of Stalin’s new elite: a chauffered government limousine; a private dacha in the exclusive settlement of Serebrianyi Bor; and access to the secret shops reserved for Party workers, where hard-to-get consumer goods were readily available. Leonid describes his earliest memories as

fragmentary recollections filled with a sense of abundance and the atmosphere of a magical fairy-tale: there I am on my father’s strong shoulders looking round at a sea of lights and marble splendour (it must have been in the newly opened Metro in Moscow)… There we are by the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square on 1 May.30

Maria employed a nanny, who lived in the pantry of the Makhnach apartment. Maria’s aim was to go back to work at the Commissariat. But Vladimir was violently opposed to the idea (he told Maria that ‘a senior Party leader should have a wife who stays at home’) and lost his temper when she tried to change his mind. Like many Party men, Vladimir believed that his family life should be subordinated to his Party obligations: because his work was more important to the Party than his wife’s, it was her duty to support him by organizing a ‘well-ordered Communist home’. In November 1935, he wrote to Maria from a work trip to Leningrad:

My darling! I shall be away for several weeks. I shall write to you with my news and instructions. For the moment all I need is a few books [a list follows]… It would be a good idea to decorate the hall, it’s a little dark. That is all. Make sure our little one is safe and sound. And take care of yourself. Wrap up warm when you go out… Forget your illusions of going back to work. Your place now is in the home.31

Vladimir Makhnach, 1934

Maria and Leonid, 1940s

The return to ‘bourgeois’ material values was sometimes yet another source of tension within families. Anatoly Golovnia was a leading figure in the Soviet cinema, the cameraman and close collaborator of Vsevolod Pudovkin, who directed several classic Soviet films, Mother (1926), Storm over Asia (1930) and The Deserter (1933), and won the Stalin Prize no less than five times. Golovnia was born in 1900 in the Crimean town of Simferopol. His father, a minor nobleman, died when he was two, leaving his mother to raise Anatoly and his brother Pyotr on a small pension. The family moved to Kherson, where the boys received a grant from the Noble Assembly to study at the First Gymnasium, a type of grammar school. After the October Revolution, Anatoly joined the Cheka, while Pyotr joined the Whites. In 1920, Anatoly was put in charge of a small Cheka unit with the task of ambushing a White brigade encamped nearby. The brigade was led by his closest friend at school, the son of the chairman of the Kherson Noble Assembly. Anatoly could not bring himself to carry out the order, so he plied his men with vodka and crossed over to the Whites to warn them to escape. This whole episode of Anatoly’s life – which is documented in his diaries – was erased from his biography. For the next three years, Anatoly lived on the run from the Reds. First he settled in Tashkent, where he tried to become an agronomist, but after he was rejected from the agricultural school, he fled to Moscow, where he enrolled at the State Technical-Institute of Cinematography (GTK), the newly opened film school in the Soviet capital, to study camera-work in September 1923. It was there that he met and fell in love with Liuba Ivanova, a young actress of extraordinary beauty, who had just arrived in Moscow from Cheliabinsk in the Urals, where she had been born in 1905, the youngest of fourteen children in a peasant family. The couple were soon married, but they spent a lot of time apart, working on location for their films. Their daughter Oksana was often sent by train to stay with aunts in Kherson, or to Cheliabinsk, where she would stay with her grandmother.

In 1933, Anatoly and Liuba received their first apartment – two small rooms in a communal flat located in the courtyard annexe of a large housing block in the centre of Moscow. Their daughter Oksana, who was then aged seven, recalls the apartment in her memoirs (1981):

The floorboards were painted red [because there was no carpet]… Today’s young people, who live for material possessions, would think that they were visiting a store of discarded furniture, or even a rubbish dump. The most valuable thing in our flat was the ‘Slavonic’ chest of drawers. All our kitchen goods were stored in a home-made cupboard painted white. There were two spring mattresses, Papa’s writing table, and three Finnish bookcases with glass fronts – my favourite piece of furniture, because they contained our books… I slept on a fold- up camp-bed behind the china cupboard in a corner of the living room. The camp-bed was the only thing that ‘belonged’ to me. I would talk to it at night. I used to think it told me dreams.32

These were modest living quarters for two important figures of the Soviet cinema. By this time Liuba was a leading actress at the Mezhrabpomfilm studios and had starred in several silent films. Anatoly attached little significance to personal property. He was ‘opposed to it on principle’, as he often said, and strongly disapproved of luxury and abundance. ‘White shirts and ties were the only things he owned in excessive quantities,’ recalls Oksana. Anatoly’s austerity was rooted in the values of his class (the impoverished nobility from which so many of Russia’s leading writers, artists, thinkers and revolutionaries had emerged) and the frugal habits of his mother, who had raised her sons on a small widow’s pension, making sacrifices so that they could go to school. It was precisely this ethos of hard work and discipline that had attracted Anatoly to the Bolsheviks in 1917. According to his granddaughter, there was ‘always something of the Chekist in his character. He was severe and strict as a grandfather and never once indulged me as a child.’33

Liuba was different. Warm and affectionate, excessive in her passions, she was used to being spoilt, as she had always been as the youngest and most pretty in her family, and eager to enjoy the high life of Moscow. She dressed expensively and had a lot of jewellery. In 1934, Liuba fell in love with the glamorous and handsome boss of