Then my father broke his silence and said: ‘Goodbye.’ Mama clung to him and cried, while he stroked her head, saying over and over, ‘Don’t worry, it will be sorted out.’
That night destroyed something inside me. It shattered my belief in harmony and meaning in the world. In our family there had been a cult of our father. He stood on such a pedestal for us that, when he fell, it felt as if the whole world was ending. I was terrified to look him in the eye, in case he saw my fear. The NKVD men led Papa towards the door. I followed him. Suddenly he turned around to look at me once more. He could see the chaos of emotions inside me. Choked by tears, I threw myself at him. He whispered in my ear: ‘Little one, my beloved daughter, there are mistakes in history, but remember – we started something great. Be a good Young Communist.’
‘Quiet!’ shouted Beigel. Then someone pulled me away from Papa.
‘Farewell, my loved ones. Believe in justice…’ – he wanted to say something else but they took him out and down the stairs.35
The idea that Ida might be arrested was not an idle threat by the NKVD officer. At sixteen years of age, she could be arrested and imprisoned, and even executed, for the same crimes as any adult. In 1935, the Soviet government had lowered the age of criminal responsibility to just twelve – partly with the aim of threatening those in prison with the arrest of their children if they refused to confess to their crimes (a second decree that year allowed the arrest and imprisonment of relatives of anyone who was in prison for crimes against the state). In effect a hostage system was declared. Many Bolsheviks were threatened with the arrest of their relatives during the interrogations that preceded the show trials. Kamenev, for example, was threatened with the execution of his son: he agreed to sign his confession on Stalin’s personal assurances that his family would not be touched. Zinoviev did the same. Ivan Smirnov gave in during his interrogation when he saw his daughter being roughly treated by the guards. Stanislav Kosior withstood brutal tortures but cracked when his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought into the room and raped in front of him.36
Ida Slavina (left) and her parents, 1937
Whatever Stalin promised these Bolsheviks before their trial, once they had been shot, he ordered the arrest of many of their relatives. Kamenev’s son was shot in 1939 (a younger son was sent to an orphanage and had his name changed to Glebov). Kamenev’s wife, who had been sent into penal exile in 1935, was retried in 1938 and shot in 1941. Zinoviev’s son was shot in 1937. His sister was sent to the Vorkuta camps and later shot. Three other sisters, two nephews, a niece, a cousin and a brother-in-law were sent to labour camps. Three of Zinoviev’s brothers and a nephew were also shot. Smirnov’s daughter was imprisoned. His wife was shot in one of the Kotlas labour camps in 1938. Virtually all the Trotsky clan was murdered by the NKVD between 1936 and 1938: Trotsky’s brother Aleksandr; his sister Olga; his first wife Aleksandra Sokolovskaia; his sons Lev and Sergei; and both husbands of his daughter Zinaida (who had committed suicide in 1933).37
Stalin’s obsession with punishing the kin of his enemies was perhaps something he had picked up from Georgia: vendettas between clans were part of politics in the Caucasus. In the Bolshevik elite, family and clans intersected with political allegiances; alliances were made through marriages; careers were broken through ties of blood to oppositionists and enemies. As Stalin saw it, the family was collectively responsible for the behaviour of its individual members. If a man had been arrested as an ‘enemy of the people’, his wife was guilty automatically, because unless she had denounced him, it was assumed that she had shared her husband’s views or had tried to protect him. At the very least she was guilty of lack of vigilance. Stalin considered the repression of these relatives as a necessary measure to remove disgruntled people from society. Asked why the families of Stalin’s ‘enemies’ had been repressed, Molotov explained in 1986: ‘They had to be isolated. Otherwise, they would have spread all kinds of complaints, and society would have been infected by a certain amount of demoralization.’38
Julia Piatnitskaia lived in expectation of her own arrest. She confessed her worries to the diary she started keeping in the days leading up to the arrest of Osip on 7 July. Her fears floated on a sea of daily problems and anxieties. Vladimir, her younger son, had to be brought back from the Crimea, where he had been at the Artek camp for Pioneers since the start of June. Julia was afraid that he might be taken to an orphanage by the NKVD, if she was arrested before she could arrange for relatives and friends to take him in. Her older son Igor had just turned sixteen. Before the arrest of his father he had been eager to make a name for himself in the Komsomol, but everything was different now, and he too was in danger of arrest. Julia tried to deal with Igor’s mixed emotions – anger at his father, grief at his loss, despondency and shame – while struggling to contain her own, equally confused feelings. ‘Igor spends the whole day reading on his bed,’ Julia noted in her diary on 11 July.
He says nothing about Papa, nor about the actions of his former ‘comrades’. Sometimes I express my foul and poisonous thoughts, but he, like the Young Communist he is, forbids me to speak like that. Sometimes he says: ‘Mama, I can’t stand you when you’re like this, I could murder you.’39
Julia’s immediate concern was to make ends meet. Like many wives deprived of their husbands in the Great Terror, she was so preoccupied by the daily struggle to survive, so traumatized by her sudden fall in status, that she barely stopped to think about the danger she was in.40 During the house search Julia lost her savings book and any valuables she might have been able to sell. All she had was a tiny salary from her office job, which hardly sufficed to feed the five dependants who were living in her flat (her sons, her aged father and stepmother and their daughter Liudmila, who did not have a job). They also had a boxer dog. The family lived on soup and kasha. Accustomed to a life of privilege as the wife of a senior Bolshevik, Julia found it hard to adapt to her poverty. She felt bitter and sorry for herself. She even went to the Party offices and complained to an official, who told her to toughen up and get used to the lifestyle of the proletariat. She spent much of her spare time wandering round the city in a fruitless search for a better job. The steel construction trust (TsKMash) had no room for ‘specialists’ (‘We are not Fascist Germany,’ the official said to Julia). Even the factory at the Butyrki prison had no need for workers of ‘her sort’ (i.e. wives of ‘enemies’). ‘The factory official didn’t even look at my papers,’ Julia wrote in her diary, ‘he didn’t want to ask me anything: he just looked at me and said “no”.’ Work colleagues refused to help. ‘Everyone avoids me,’ Julia wrote. ‘Yet I so much need support, even just the slightest attention or advice.’ At home, meanwhile, tensions grew as the situation steadily worsened. Julia’s half-sister and stepmother frequently complained about the lack of food and blamed Osip for their troubles. They even tried to get Julia evicted from the apartment. After a few weeks, Liudmila got a job and moved out with her parents to another flat rather than ‘be dragged down’ with the Piatnitskys. ‘If all of us can’t be saved,’ Liudmila said, ‘then let those who are able save themselves.’ Julia wondered if Liudmila and her parents felt ashamed of their behaviour. She doubted it:
It is only shameful that for seven years they were fed by Piatnitsky, Liuba [Liudmila] got to go to a good school, and they lived in a good apartment. As soon as we get into trouble, they think only about how to run as fast as possible from me and my children – from the unfortunates.41
Not long after they moved out, Julia and her sons were evicted from their home and placed in a smaller apartment on a lower floor of the House on the Embankment. They shared the apartment with the family of an Armenian Bolshevik who had been arrested in the spring. Julia was desperate, she felt as if her life was collapsing and she thought of suicide. In her desperation she went to see a neighbour, the only person in the House on the Embankment who was not afraid to speak to her, and talked about her woes. The old lady told her not to feel so sorry for herself: there were many officials who lived in smaller rooms. Besides, the woman said, Julia was better off without Piatnitsky, because, she explained, ‘you were not getting along so well’. Now she only had to think about herself and her two sons, not about her husband any more. Reflecting on the conversation, Julia wrote in her diary that night: ‘It is true that he did not spend much time with us. He was always working. And it was obvious to everyone who came to scrounge from us – that is almost everyone – that we were not getting along.’42 It was not the only doubt that Julia would have about her husband over the next year.
2
The diary of the writer Mikhail Prishvin, 29 November 1937:
Our Russian people, like snow-covered trees, are so overburdened with the problems of survival, and
