The belief in their own innocence disabled many Bolsheviks. Somehow they managed to convince themselves that only the guilty were arrested, and that they would be protected by their innocence. Elena Bonner recalls overhearing a late-night conversation between her parents, lifelong Party loyalists, following the arrest of a close friend. Elena had woken up in the middle of the night, anxious because this arrest had made her realize ‘that our turn was coming, inexorably and soon’.
It was dark in the dining room, but there were voices in my parents’ room. I went to the door. And I could hear my mother blow her nose. Then she spoke, crying. I had never seen her cry. She kept repeating ‘all my life’ and sobbing… Papa replied softly, but I couldn’t make out his words. Suddenly she shouted, ‘I’ve known Styopa all my life. Do you know what that means? I’ve known him three times longer than you. Understand? Do you understand?’ Then only sobs. And a creak and slippers shuffling on the floor – Papa had gotten out of bed. I jumped away from the door, afraid he was coming out. But he began pacing the room – five steps to the window, five to the bed, like a pendulum. He struck a match. Mama began speaking again, ‘Tell me do you believe it? Do you believe this nightmare?’ She had stopped crying. ‘Do you believe that Agasi… Do you believe that Pavel, that Shurka… Do you believe that they…?’ She didn’t complete her sentences, but it was clear. Then she spoke calmly and softly and said, ‘I know that you can’t believe it.’ Papa replied in a strange, pleading voice, ‘But Rufa-
There were other Bolsheviks, among them Piatnitsky, who were so committed to their Communist beliefs that they were ready to confess to the charges against them, even if they knew that they were innocent, if that was what the Party demanded.* According to Communist morality, a Bolshevik accused of crimes against the Party was expected to repent, to go down on his knees before the Party and accept its judgement against him. This is what Piatnitsky must have meant when he said on the eve of his arrest that if a sacrifice was needed for the Party he would ‘bear it joyously’.
Many Bolsheviks attempted to prepare their family for the likelihood of their arrest and, as best they could, to protect them. Pyotr Potapov, a transport official on the Kama River, sent his family to visit relatives in Nizhny Novgorod a few days before his arrest in August 1937. ‘We had not been on holiday for more than five years,’ recalls his daughter. ‘He sensed what lay ahead and was afraid for us. He wanted us to be out of the way when the NKVD came for him.’ Lev Ilin, a senior official on the Murmansk railway, moved his family out of their spacious flat in Leningrad and put them in a small cooperative apartment, so that they would not be forced to share their living space with another family in the event of his arrest. He made sure that his wife, who had never worked, took a job in a textile factory, so that someone in the family would be able to support their daughter. He begged his wife to divorce him, in the hope that she would be protected from arrest herself, but she refused, on the grounds that it would be a ‘shameful act of betrayal’. There were bitter arguments between the couple on this point, right up to the day of Lev’s arrest.33
Stanislav and Varvara Budkevich, who were both arrested in 1937, tried to prepare their fourteen-year-old daughter Maria to cope on her own. They trained her to go shopping by herself, taught her not to say a word about her parents if they were arrested and forced her to read about the show trials in the newspapers, so that she might understand the nature of the threat that might take them both away. ‘I understood everything,’ recalls Maria. ‘My father was close to Tukhachevsky, he worked with him in the General Staff, and our house was full of military personnel, so I understood what was happening when people were arrested, one by one.’ Maria’s father was arrested on 8 July; her mother on 14 July.
Mama sensed that they would come for her that night. For a long time that evening we sat together on our own, without Andrei [Maria’s younger brother], although Mama knew that I had exams the next morning. It was midnight when at last she said to me, ‘It is getting late, off you go to bed.’
The next morning Maria awoke to find her mother gone – she had been arrested during the night – and the NKVD men searching through her room. By her bed her mother had left Maria a goodbye note with some money.34
The jurist Ilia Slavin was arrested on the night of 5 November 1937. He had not written the book commissioned by the NKVD about the reforging of Gulag labourers on the White Sea Canal. On the day of his arrest, Ilia was called into the Party’s offices in Leningrad and offered the position of Director of the Institute of Law; the previous director had just been arrested. Slavin was relieved. He had been expecting the worst, but now it seemed he had been saved. He returned home in a cheerful mood. That evening the Slavin family was celebrating Ida’s sixteenth birthday. As Ida recalls:
Mama laid out a delicious spread. My brother made a special ‘birthday edition’ of our wall-newspaper ‘Hallelujah’ [an agitational billboard maintained at home by the Slavin family] and became the pianist for the evening. I put on a smart new dress to receive my schoolfriends… Papa was in his best form: he played with us, fooled around just like a child, danced with all the girls, drank a lot and even sang his favourite song, ‘The Nightingale’.
When the guests had gone, Ilia began to talk about his plans for the next summer holiday. ‘He wanted us to spend it all together as a family and spoke of going to the Caucasus and the Black Sea.’
The NKVD came at 1 a.m. Ida remembers:
I was suddenly awoken by a bright light and a strange voice, telling me to get dressed quickly. An NKVD officer was standing at the door. He made half an effort to look away as I struggled to get dressed and then led me into Papa’s office. There was Papa, sitting on a stool in the middle of the room, looking suddenly much older. Mama, my brother and his pregnant wife sat with me on the divan. The yardman stood in the doorway while the NKVD officer made himself at home…
I remember only certain moments from that night:
Looking around my father’s office, the NKVD officer (I shall always remember his name: Beigel) would sigh from time to time: ‘What a lot of books you have. I am a student, and I don’t have this many books.’ Leafing through the books, he would stop whenever he found one with an inscription to my father, pound his fist on the table and demand in a loud voice, ‘Who is this author?’
Then in an almost tragi-comic scene Beigel told me to bring my German textbook. Theatrically (he had evidently played this scene in many households with children of my age) he turned to an article by Karl Radek at the end of the textbook. At that time Karl Radek had been arrested but had not yet been sentenced or listed in the press as an ‘enemy of the people’. With a grand gesture Beigel tore the pages out of the textbook, lit them with a match, and said, as if he was a noble hero: ‘Be thankful that this thing has been destroyed and that I won’t have to take you away with your daddy.’ I was too frightened to say anything. But then my father broke the silence, and said ‘Thank you.’…
Aside from this officious Beigel the main thing engraved in my memory is the motionless figure of my father. I had never seen him like that before – so totally dejected, his spirit somehow gone, almost indifferent to the humiliation he was suffering. He was unlike himself… When I looked at him, there was no expression on his face, he did not see or feel my gaze. He just sat there in the middle of the room – motionless and silent. It was him – and yet not him.
The house-search went on all night. From the office they went into the dining room and then into my brother’s room. The floor was covered with pages ripped from books and manuscripts which had been pulled out of the cupboards and glass-fronted cabinets, photographs from family albums, which had been carefully stored in a special trunk. Many of these things they took away. They also took a camera, a pair of binoculars (evidence of ‘espionage’) and a typewriter – our old Underwood on which my father had typed all his articles…
What was he thinking during that long night, as they leafed through the pages of his life? Did it destroy his faith? What terror did he feel when Beigel (that insignificant worm!) recorded the details of his Party membership as evidence of his crime?
It was morning when the search came to an end; everything was registered for confiscation, and father was led into the corridor. We followed him. The door to my parents’ room was sealed. They told Papa to get dressed. Mama had his things all ready in a little case [it contained a pair of spectacles, toiletries, a handkerchief and 100 roubles cash].
