On her release from the Verkhneuralsk prison in 1936, Tatiana was exiled to Uralsk and then to Alma-Ata. Feoktista spent two weeks with Tatiana in Uralsk in March 1936. These were precious weeks for Tatiana, who later wrote of a new intimacy she experienced with her mother when they sat together, ‘my head resting on your shoulder’, and talked about the past.126 Shortly after Feoktista’s return to Moscow, Tatiana wrote: ‘Mamusenka! I came home but this is not a home. You are not here, there is no
we found some people to look after me on the journey, packed all my things and sent a telegram with details about my arrival. The answer came: ‘The addressee does not live here.’ We returned the ticket. I stayed in Moscow and never saw my mother again.
Tatiana was sent to Kolyma, one of the worst of Stalin’s Gulag colonies. In November 1937, she was shot. Mikhail was executed in Karelia during the same month. His correspondence with his wife (a ‘Trotskyist’) was recorded in his NKVD file as sufficient proof of guilt to sentence him to death.127
Rada did not know about her parents’ death. She tried not to think about them, because she did not know if they were alive or not. But once she saw her mother in a dream:
To start with I was on the deck of a ship in the middle of the sea. In my hands I held two schoolbooks covered in glued-on brown paper. I opened one of them and recognized my mother’s handwriting. The first sentence was very strange: ‘When you read these lines, I will already be at the bottom of the sea…’ I read a few more lines, which I can’t recall. Then I became gripped with fear. There were enormous pipes with water gushing out. My fear increased, seizing hold of me, until I awoke.128
Rada believed the ‘message’ of her dream – that her mother had been drowned – and began to think about her all the time. Later, when she heard tales from Kolyma survivors about a ship of prisoners that had gone down, she was even more convinced of her mother’s fate. She continued to believe her dream for many years and, even after she received a death certificate from the authorities stating that her mother had been shot, Rada went on thinking that she had been drowned.
Tatiana Poloz was not the only fervent socialist who felt the pull of family after imprisonment. Nikolai Kondratiev was born in 1892 to a peasant family in Kostroma province, 400 kilometres north-east of Moscow. He studied economics at St Petersburg University, joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party and played a leading role in formulating the agrarian reforms of 1917. In the 1920s, Kondratiev was a prominent economist advising the Soviet government. He was a firm supporter of the NEP, favouring the primacy of agriculture and the manufacturing of consumer goods over the development of heavy industry. It was at this time that he advanced his theory of long-term cycles in the capitalist economy (‘Kondratiev waves’) which made him famous throughout the world. But with the overturning of the NEP Kondratiev was removed from all his posts. In July 1930, he was arrested on charges of belonging to an illegal (and probably non-existent) ‘Peasant Labour Party’. Stalin wrote to Molotov: ‘Kondratiev and a few other scoundrels must definitely be shot.’129 But in fact Kondratiev was sentenced to eight years in the special isolation prison camp housed in the fourteenth-century Spaso-Yefimeyev Monastery in Suzdal, where he was imprisoned from February 1932.
Kondratiev’s health deteriorated rapidly. He was in and out of the prison hospital with complaints of severe headaches, dizziness and intermittent deafness, chronic rheumatism in the legs, diarrhoea, vomiting, insomnia and depression. By 1936, he was practically blind. Yet Kondratiev carried on with his research and prepared five new books. He wrote over 100 letters to his wife, Yevgeniia,130 nearly all of them with little notes attached for his daughter Elena (‘Alyona’), who was born in 1925. The pain of separation which Kondratiev felt is almost palpable in these letters. It is his daughter that he misses most. The situation was all the more poignant because Kondratiev was obviously such a loving father. He desperately wanted to play an active role in his daughter’s upbringing, and the worst part of his suffering in jail was not being able to do this. ‘How terrible that she is growing up in my absence,’ he wrote to Yevgeniia in March 1932. ‘This torments me more than anything.’131 As a father, Nikolai poured all his love into his letters to Elena. When she did not write to him, he reproached her for not loving him enough. Nikolai would constantly remind her of little incidents from their life together before his arrest. He drew pictures in his letters and told her stories about the wildlife around the monastery – birds that came to visit him, foxes he had seen. In many of his letters Nikolai included pressed flowers, or grasses from the meadows near the monastery. Above all, he focused his attention on his daughter’s intellectual development. He set her riddles and puzzles. He recommended books for her to read, asking her to write with her impressions about them. He encouraged her to keep a diary, corrected the mistakes in her letters and nagged her to ‘write neatly and always try to do things well’.132 On the bottom of many of his letters a young child has written the word: ‘Papa’. They were all Elena had of him. She grew up to become a botanist, a professor of Moscow University. Perhaps her father’s letters influenced her interest in botany.
Nikolai and Elena (‘Alyona’) Kondratiev, 1926
In 1935, Nikolai sent Elena a fairy-tale which he had written and illustrated to mark her name day.133 ‘The Unusual Adventures of Shammi’ tells the story of a kitten who goes in search of the ideal land, where ‘people, animals and plants live in happiness and harmony’. Shammi sets off with his friend, the tomcat Vasia, who is very cowardly and reluctant to go. On the way they encounter many animals who try to dissuade them from going on, promising them happiness if they give up the search, but Shammi pushes ahead, attracting various animals – a goat, a donkey, a horse and a hen – who ‘all work hard and want a better life’. But soon the travellers lose their way. They begin to argue among themselves. Some get eaten by a crocodile. Others are shot by hunters in the wood.
On 31 August 1938 Kondratiev wrote to his daughter:
‘The Unusual Adventures of Shammi’ (detail)
My sweet darling Alyonushka.
Probably your holidays are over now and you are back at school. How did you spend the summer? Did you get stronger, put on weight, get tanned? I very much want to know. And I would like very, very much to see you and kiss you many, many times. I still do not feel well, I am still ill. My sweet, Alyonushka, I want you not to get sick this winter. I also want you to study hard, as you did before. Read good books. Be a clever and a good little girl. Listen to your mother and never disappoint her. I would also be happy if you managed not to forget about me, your papa, altogether. Well, be healthy! Be happy! I kiss you without end. Your papa.134
This was the last letter. Shortly afterwards, on 17 September, Nikolai was executed by a firing squad.
4
The Great Fear
(1937–8)
1
Julia Piatnitskaia did not know what to think when her husband was arrested on the night of 7 July 1937. Osip Piatnitsky was a veteran Bolshevik, a member of the Party from its foundation and one of Lenin’s most trusted comrades. In an article in
