him in Rostov-on-Don after her release in 1945.55
It was not just to Gulag officials that women in the camp looked for protection. The fate of female prisoners could sometimes be determined by powerful protectors outside the camps. One of the prisoners in ALZhIR was Liuba Golovnia, the ex-wife of the film-maker Anatoly Golovnia. Liuba was arrested and sentenced to five years in the labour camp in April 1938, four months after the arrest of her second husband, Boris Babitsky, the head of the Mezhrabpomfilm studios in Moscow, who was shot in 1939. Liuba later thought that she had been arrested because she had purchased furniture from the NKVD warehouses in Leningrad (she felt so guilty about the furniture, which had been confiscated from the victims of arrests, that she sold it all after her return from the labour camps). But in fact she was arrested just because she was Babitsky’s wife. Babitsky had been caught up in a scandal that led to dozens of arrests in the Soviet film world. The hit songs from Grigorii Aleksandrov’s film
When Liuba was arrested, the couple’s three children from three different marriages were taken by the NKVD from her apartment in the Comintern hotel: the two-year-old Alyosha, Liuba’s son from her marriage to Babitsky, was sent to an orphanage in the centre of Moscow, while Volik, Babitsky’s thirteen-year-old son from his first marriage, and Oksana, eleven, Liuba’s daughter from her marriage to Anatoly, were taken to the NKVD detention centre at the old Danilov Monastery. Oksana was kept with twenty other girls in one of the monastery’s many cells, all filled to bursting with children. Volik was taken to a special area for the over-twelves who, having reached the age of criminal responsibility, would be transferred to the special ‘children’s camps’ and penal colonies administered by the NKVD. Volik’s fingerprints and mug-shots were taken for his criminal record.
A few weeks later, Oksana’s father, Anatoly Golovnia, appeared at the monastery. Oksana recalls the moment she first saw her father in the courtyard. Dressed in a leather coat, he had his back to her, but she recognized him, even at a distance, and began shouting ‘Papa! Papa!’ from her cell window as loud as she could. Anatoly walked towards the gates. He was about to leave, having been informed by the director that Oksana was not there. A Black Maria – one of the notorious NKVD vans used to pick up suspects from their homes – passed Anatoly and drove through the gates, the noise of its engine blocking out the cries of his child. Oksana became desperate. She realized that this was her last chance. She let out one more shout. This time Anatoly turned around. She yelled again and waved her hands through the iron bars on the window. Anatoly looked up at the building. There were so many windows and so many faces peering out that Golovnia had a hard time finding his daughter’s face, but at last he picked her out with his cameraman’s eyes. He hurried back to the director’s office, to which Oksana was summoned. She told her father that Volik had been brought to the monastery as well. To get her out was relatively straightforward: legally she was still Anatoly’s child. But to rescue Volik, who was considered an adult, and in any case was not Anatoly’s son, required help from contacts in the NKVD. After hours of negotiations and several phone calls to the Lubianka, Volik was released. As for Alyosha, Anatoly could not find out what had happened to him. But Oksana remembered where the NKVD car had dropped him before taking her and Volik to the monastery. With her father, she retraced the route they had followed from the Babitsky flat in the Comintern hotel. Locating the orphanage, Anatoly ‘went inside and half an hour later reappeared with Alyosha in his arms’, recalls Oksana.56
All three children found a refuge in Anatoly’s home, two small rooms in a communal apartment in the centre of Moscow that he shared with his mother, the haughty Lydia Ivanovna. A year later, in September 1939, Volik’s mother came for him, and the two disappeared into the countryside. Liuba’s older sister Polina took Alyosha to the Babitsky dacha at Kratovo, where they lived with Polina’s sister Vera and her father in two small rooms; the third and largest room was occupied by another family. Polina worked in Moscow and sometimes stayed at Anatoly’s apartment. Widowed twice, without children of her own, Polina stoically bore the suffering life brought her. After her sister’s arrest she had been evicted from her home and sacked from her job as the Secretary of the Moscow Maly Theatre. She worked for a while as a room-attendant in the Moscow Theatre Museum, but was fired from that job as well, and ended up as a machine operator in a factory.57
Nothing was heard from Liuba for a year. The ‘special regime’ at ALZhIR forbade prisoners to write to relatives. Then, in the spring of 1939, just as the ‘special regime’ was lifted, a telegram arrived. Polina wrote back to her sister, and a busy correspondence started up between the two, nearly all of it about domestic details and the bringing up of the children, although, according to Oksana, there was much else said as well, but in code to conceal it from the censors. A devoted sister, Polina wrote to Liuba almost every week. She sent money, books, clothes, typed-out articles from magazines and photographs of the children, especially of Alyosha.
Anatoly wrote to Liuba less often, and his letters had a different character. He sent her money, food parcels and a manual for film projectionists, so that she could learn a practical skill. During the first year, Liuba had worked on a building site but she fell and broke her hand while hauling logs and was transferred to lighter work by Barinov, the camp commandant, who, after receiving a request from Anatoly, allowed her to run the cinema in the club house. This was not the only privilege that Liuba received from Barinov. In 1942, Polina died in Dzhambul, Kazakhstan, where she had fled with Alyosha when she became afraid of her own arrest in January of that year. Alyosha was placed in an orphanage by distant relatives, who then sent a telegram to Liuba in ALZhIR. Liuba was allowed to travel to Dzhambul, several hundred kilometres to the south of Akmolinsk, retrieve Alyosha from the orphanage and bring him back to live with her in ALZhIR’s outer zone. It was an extraordinary concession to make to a prisoner, and Barinov, who signed the release papers, did so at great personal risk. It is possible that Liuba’s beauty played its part in winning these concessions, though this is not the view of her fellow prisoners, who stressed instead the influence of Anatoly Golovnia. In his letters to Liuba, Anatoly wrote without apparent fear of the censors (in many of his letters he criticized the Soviet film authorities). Anatoly wrote about his love for Liuba. He forgave her for leaving him, and pleaded with her to come back to him on her release (‘which may not be so far away as you believe… I am sure I can get somewhere if I petition the authorities for you’). Liuba, unaware of Babitsky’s fate, warded him off. But Anatoly perservered. He wrote about the success of his films,
5
In January 1939, the writer Konstantin Simonov married Zhenia Las-kina, the youngest of Samuil Laskin’s three daughters, who had been a student with Simonov at the Literary Institute since 1936. They had started their romance the previous spring, when Simonov was still married to Natalia Tipot, another classmate, although in those days the civil marriages formed in the bohemian circles of the Moscow student world did not have much real significance. According to Zhenia, Simonov began to court her with a romantic poem (‘Five Pages’) that he had originally written for Natalia. It was typical perhaps of all young poets to recycle love poems for new sexual conquests, and certainly typical of Simonov’s relations with women at that time. He was quick and clumsy, prone to fall head over heels in love and sexually inexperienced.59
Zhenia was a tiny woman, almost pocket-sized, with graceful features. But Simonov was also clearly drawn by her spiritual qualities: she was generous and patient, devoted to her friends and she had that rare capacity to get on with almost anyone (a talent she inherited from her father) and to affect them with her kindness. Zhenia was the Secretary of the Student Union at the Literary Institute. During the purge meetings at the institute in 1937, when Simonov had denounced Dolmatovsky, she had courageously defended two foreign students – too weak to defend themselves – whose work she felt had been unfairly criticized by members of the teaching staff.60 Whatattracted Zhenia to Simonov is hard to tell.
