want so much to talk to one another about it, that they simply lack the strength to hold out any more. But as soon as someone gives in, he is overheard by someone else – and he disappears! People know they can get into trouble for a single conversation; and so they enter into a conspiracy of silence with their friends. My dear friend N… was delighted to spot me in a crowded [train] compartment, and when at last a seat was free, he sat down next to me. He wanted to say something but was unable to say it in such a crowd. He became so tense that every time he prepared himself to speak he looked around at the people on one side of us, and then at the people on the other side, and all he could bring himself to say was: ‘Yes…’ And I said the same in return to him, and in this way, for two hours, we travelled together from Moscow to Zagorsk:
‘Yes, Mikhail Mikhailovich.’
‘Yes, Georgii Eduardovich.’43
Talking could be dangerous at the best of Soviet times, but during the Great Terror a few careless words were all it took for somebody to vanish for ever. Informers were everywhere. ‘Today a man talks freely only with his wife – at night, with the blankets pulled over his head,’ the writer Isaak Babel once remarked. Prishvin wrote in his diary that among his friends there were ‘only two or three old men’ to whom he could talk freely, without fear of giving rise to malicious rumours or denunciations.44
The Great Terror effectively silenced the Soviet people. ‘We were brought up to keep our mouths shut,’ recalls Rezeda Taisina, whose father was arrested in 1936.
‘You’ll get into trouble for your tongue’ – that’s what people said to us children all the time. We went through life afraid to talk. Mama used to say that every other person was an informer. We were afraid of our neighbours, and especially of the police. I am still afraid to talk. I cannot stand up for myself, or speak out in public, I always give in without saying a word. That’s in my character, because of the way I was brought up when I was a child. Even today, if I see a policeman, I begin to shake with fear.45
Maria Drozdova grew up in a strictly religious peasant family in Tver province. In 1930, the Drozdovs fled the countryside to escape the collectivization of their village. With false documents they moved to Krasnoe Selo near Leningrad, where Maria’s father worked in a furniture factory and her mother Anna in a hospital. Anna was an illiterate peasant woman. Convinced that the Bolsheviks were the Antichrist, whose agents heard and saw everything she did, she was afraid to go out in public or to talk outside the family’s room in the communal apartment where they lived. When her father, a church warden, was arrested in 1937, Anna became paralysed with fear. She would not leave the house. She became afraid of talking in the room, in case the neighbours overheard. In the evenings she was terrified of switching on the lamp, in case it drew the attention of the police. She was even afraid to go to the toilet, in case she wiped herself with a piece of newspaper which contained an article with Stalin’s name.46
Among acquaintances there was a tacit agreement not to talk about political events. Anyone could be arrested and forced by the police to incriminate his friends by reporting such conversations as evidence of their ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities. In this climate, to initiate political discussions with anyone except one’s closest friends was to invite suspicion of being an informer or provocateur.
Vera Turkina recalls the silence with which her friends and neighbours responded to the arrest of her father, the chairman of the provincial court in Perm:
There were three girls in the house opposite ours whose father had also been arrested… We all tried to avoid the subject. ‘He is not here, he has gone away, somewhere’, is all that we would say… My father was a victim of his ‘loose tongue’ – that’s what we understood in our family – he was too direct and outspoken, and somewhere he had said more than he should have done. The belief that talk had been the cause of his arrest reinforced our own silence.47
Silent stoicism was a common reaction to the loss of friends and relatives. As Emma Gershtein wrote about the poet Mandelshtam in 1937: ‘He did not speak of departed and now dead friends. No-one then did… Anything but tears! Such was the character of those years.’48
Silence reigned in many families. People did not talk about arrested relatives. They destroyed their letters, or hid them from their children, hoping it would protect them. Even in the home it was dangerous to talk about such relatives, because, as it was said, ‘the walls have ears’. After the arrest of her husband, Sergei Kruglov, in 1937, Anastasia and her two children were moved into a communal apartment, where a thin partition wall separated them from the family of an NKVD operative in the neighbouring room. ‘Everything was audible, they could hear us sneeze, even hear us talk in the quietest whisper. Mama was always telling us to be silent,’ recalls Tatiana Kruglova. For thirty years, they lived in fear of talking, because they were convinced that their NKVD neighbour was reporting what they said (in fact he kept them in this state of fear because he wanted quiet and obedient neighbours).49
After the arrest of her father, Natalia Danilova was taken by her mother to live with her family, the Osorgins, where all talk about her father was prohibited. The Osorgins were a noble family, and several of its members had been arrested by the Bolsheviks, including the husband of Natalia’s aunt Mania, who ruled the household with her forceful personality. ‘She was hostile to my father, perhaps because he was a peasant and a socialist,’ Natalia recalls. ‘She seemed to think he was guilty, that he had merited his own arrest, and that through his actions he had brought trouble to the family. She forced this version of events upon the rest of us. She alone had the right to speak about such things; the rest of us could only whisper in dissent.’50
Families developed special rules of conversation. They learned to speak elliptically, to allude to ideas and opinions in a manner that concealed their meaning from strangers, neighbours and servants. Emma Gershtein recalls a cousin’s wife, Margarita Gershtein, a veteran oppositionist, who was living with her family in Moscow for a while. One day Margarita was talking about the pointlessness of opposing Stalin and was in the middle of a sentence (‘Of course, we could rub out Stalin, but…’) when
the door opened and into the dining-room came Polya, our housemaid. I shuddered and was terrified, but Margarita, without altering her lazy pose, rounded off the phrase in exactly the same intonation, in the same clear voice: ‘so, Emmochka, go ahead and buy the silk, don’t hesitate. You deserve a new dress after all you’ve done.’ When the housemaid had left, Margarita explained that one should never give the impression of having been caught unawares. ‘And don’t creep about furtively or look uneasily around you.’51
Children, talkative by nature, were particularly dangerous. Many parents took the view that the less their children knew the safer everyone would be. Antonina Moiseyeva was born in 1927 to a peasant family in Saratov province. The Moiseyevs were categorized as ‘kulaks’ and exiled to a ‘special settlement’ in the Urals in 1929. After their return to Chusovoe, a town near Perm, in 1936, Antonina’s mother made a point of telling her children:
‘You must not judge anything, or you will be arrested,’ she always said. We would stand all night in a queue for bread, and she would say to us, ‘You must not judge! It’s none of your business if the government doesn’t have bread.’ Mama told us that it was a sin to pass judgement. ‘Hold your tongue!’ she would always say when we left the house.52
Vilgelm Tell grew up in a Hungarian family in Moscow. His father was arrested in one of the ‘national operations’ in 1938, when Vilgelm was nine years old. As far as he recalls, there were no specific warnings or instructions from his mother or his grandparents about how he should behave, but he sensed the atmosphere of fear:
I knew subconsciously that I had to keep quiet, that I could not speak, or say what I thought. For example, when we travelled in a crowded tram, I knew I had to remain silent, that I could not mention anything, not even things I saw out the window… I also sensed that everybody felt the same way. It was always quiet in public places like a tram. If people spoke, it was only about something trivial, like where they had been shopping. They never spoke about their work or serious things.53
Oksana Golovnia remembers travelling on a crowded Moscow bus with her father, Anatoly, the film- maker, and mentioning her ‘uncle Lodia’ (the film director Pudovkin):
