The Whisperers

Mezhrabpomfilm, Boris Babitsky. She left Anatoly and went to live with Babitsky at his dacha in Kratovo, just outside the capital, where he was living with his

From left: Anatoly Golovnia as Chekist, 1919; Liuba Golovnia, 1925; Boris Babitsky, 1932

son (Volik) from a previous marriage. In the autumn, Liuba and Boris returned to Moscow. They moved into a spacious apartment (just beneath the offices of Mezhrabpomfilm) in the Comintern hotel (Hotel Lux), in the centre. The apartment was luxurious, four large rooms off a corridor with parquet floors, and a large kitchen where a housekeeper and a nanny slept. ‘It was a palace, a museum, a fairy-tale,’ recalls Oksana, who went to live there in 1935. The interior was designed and built by a French worker from the Comintern. The furniture – valuable antiques, bronze vases, leather chairs and Persian carpets – was purchased at heavily discounted prices from the NKVD warehouses in Leningrad. The furniture had been confiscated from families of the old nobility and bourgeoisie who had been arrested and expelled from their homes, on Stalin’s orders, following the murder of Sergei Kirov, the Party boss of Leningrad, in December 1934. ‘Mama was very proud of her acquisitions,’ recalls Oksana, ‘and liked to tell us stories about every piece.’34

Anatoly’s mother, the domineering Lydia Ivanovna, who took her values from the old nobility, thought that Liuba had ‘bourgeois pretensions’. She ridiculed her ‘vulgar tastes’ in clothes and furniture because they reflected the ‘material acquisitiveness of the new Soviet elite’. She thought her son had married beneath him and once even said in a heated argument that Oksana was ‘the biggest mistake of the Revolution’, because she was the child of their mismarriage. Convinced that Liuba left her son for Babitsky because he could better satisfy her expensive tastes, Lydia tried to persuade Anatoly, who was distraught by Liuba’s departure, that he might lure her back with a more spacious apartment. But Anatoly would not compromise his principles. Looking back on these events in her memoirs, Oksana reflected on the three conflicting views on property that agitated her family: those of the nobility; the Spartan attitudes of the revolutionary Bolsheviks; and the materialistic attitudes of the new Soviet elite. Oksana sympathized with her mother’s position. She felt that her attachment to her country home was not so much a desire for property as a yearning for the sort of family life she had known as a child:

Mama always used to say that we were going to ‘our dacha’ – as if it belonged to us. I remember this because Papa often said that he was opposed to the idea of things belonging to anyone. At that age, I had no idea about property and did not think about my mother’s aspirations to have something of her own. Today, as I try to understand her better, I think that it was not just about property. Mama was not simply building a dacha – she was building a family. She made her family out of real things, just as her peasant ancestors had done for centuries. She loved Boris, she loved me and she loved Volik, and that love was the focus of her home.35

Volik Babitsky and Liuba and Oksana at the Kratovo dacha, 1935

2

Few people enjoyed the lifestyle of Liuba Golovnia. For most of the Soviet population the 1930s were years of material shortage, and even for the new bureaucracy, with access to special shops, the supply of goods was hardly plentiful. According to one estimate, during the first half of the 1930s the number of families receiving special provisions (a good estimate of the Soviet nomenklatura) was 55,500, of which 45,000 lived in Moscow. The goods they received allowed these families to live in greater comfort than the vast majority, but by Western standards they still lived very modestly. Here is a list of the goods received by the families of government workers in the centre of Moscow for one month in 1932:

4 kg of meat

4 kg of sausage

1.5 kg of butter

2 litres of oil

6 kg of fresh fish

2 kg of herring

3 kg of sugar

3 kg of flour

3 kg of grains

8 cans of food

20 eggs

2 kg of cheese

1 kg of black caviar

50 g of tea

1,200 cigarettes

2 pieces of soap

These families could also purchase clothes and shoes from special shops with coupons given to them by the government, and they had first access to any luxury foods or consumer goods when they became available. But their privileged position was relatively marginal, and the majority of Stalin’s ordinary functionaries lived a modest existence, with no more than a few extra clothes or a slightly larger living space than the average citizen. As Mankov noted with sarcasm in his diary: ‘The most that anyone can dream to own: two or three different sets of clothes, one of which is imported, an imported bicycle (or motorcycle) and an unlimited opportunity to buy grapes at 11 rbs a kilogram (when they are on sale).’36

There was a direct correlation between the allocation of material goods and power or position in the socio-political hierarchy. Below the Soviet elite nobody had many possessions – most people lived in a single pair of clothes – and there was barely enough food for everyone. But in the distribution of even these few goods there was a strict ranking system with infinite gradations between the various categories of employee based on status in the workplace, skill level and experience, and to some extent on geographical location, for rates of pay were better in Moscow and other major cities than they were in the provincial towns and rural areas. Despite its egalitarian image and ideals, this was in fact a highly stratified society. There was a rigid hierarchy of poverty.

Private trade partly compensated for the frequent shortages of the planned economy. People sold and exchanged their household goods at flea markets. If they could afford it, they could buy the produce grown by kolkhoz peasants on their garden allotments and sold at the few remaining urban markets tolerated by the government. People were allowed to sell their furniture and other precious items at the state commission stores, or exchange their jewellery and foreign currency for luxury foodstuffs and consumer goods at the Torgsin shops developed by the regime in the early 1930s to draw out the savings of the population and raise capital for the Five Year Plan. The black market flourished on the margins of the planned economy. Goods unavailable in the state stores were sold at higher prices under the counter, or siphoned off to private traders (bribe-paying friends of the manager) for resale on the black market. To cope with the problems of supply an ‘economy of favours’ came into operation through small informal networks of patrons and clients (a system known as ‘blat’). In many ways the Soviet economy could not have functioned without these private connections. To get anything (a rented room, household goods, a railway ticket, a passport or official papers) required personal contacts – family and kin, colleagues, friends, or friends of friends. The same black- market principles were known to operate in Soviet factories and institutions, where many goods and services were supplied and exchanged on the basis of personal contacts and favours. Soviet propaganda portrayed blat as a form of corruption (the aim of rooting out these private networks of patron– client relations assumed an important role in the purges), and this view was shared by many workers, in particular. But most people were ambivalent in their attitude to blat: they recognized that it was not right morally, and certainly not legal, but relied on it, as everybody did, to fulfil their needs and get around a system they knew to be unfair. Without blat it was impossible to live with any comfort in the Soviet Union. As the proverb said: ‘One must have, not a hundred roubles, but a hundred friends.’37

Housing shortages were so acute in the overcrowded towns that people would do almost anything to increase their living space. The mass influx of peasants into industry had put enormous pressure on the housing