The Whisperers

* Most of the archives were collected by the author in collaboration with the Memorial Society, a human rights and historical association organized in the late 1980s to represent and commemorate the victims of Soviet repression. Housed in the archives of the Memorial Society in St Petersburg (MSP), Moscow (MM) and Perm (MP), most of them are also available on line (http://www.orlandofiges.com) together with the transcripts and sound extracts of the interviews. Some of the materials are available in English. For more details on the research project connected with this book see the Afterword and Acknowledgements below.

* The Provisional Government was formed by liberals and moderate socialists to steer the country through to the end of the First World War and the democratic election of a Constituent Assembly. Its political authority soon collapsed, however, as workers, peasants and soldiers formed their own local revolutionary committees, the Soviets in particular, to carry out a radical social revolution. It was in the name of the Soviets that Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. The Bolsheviks, who numbered about 350,000 members on the eve of their insurrection, represented the revolutionary arm of the Social Democratic (Marxist) Party, whose moderate wing, the Mensheviks, supported the Provisional Government. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Russian Communist Party.

†There were plenty of examples to choose from, such as Aleksandr Fadeyev (the father of the future writer), who left his wife and three children to dedicate himself to the ‘people’s cause’ in 1905, or Liuba Radchenko, who left her husband and their two young daughters because, as she put it in her diary, ‘it was the duty of the true revolutionary not to be tied down by a family’ (RGAE, f. 9455, op. 3, d. 14, l. 56).

* After Marx and Engels – one of many Soviet names made up from the annals of the Revolution after 1917. Other common ‘Soviet’ names included: Vladlen (Vladimir Lenin), Engelina, Ninel, Marlen (for Marx and Lenin) and Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution).

* Leader of the White Armies in south Russia during the Civil War.

*Subbotniki, Saturday labour campaigns, were introduced in the Civil War. Students, workers and other citizens were dragooned as ‘volunteers’ into manual labour tasks such as clearing rubbish from the streets. It soon became a permanent feature of the Soviet way of life: not only days but whole weeks were set aside when the population would be called upon to work without pay.

* The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest party in Russia in 1917. Drawing their support from the peasantry, they held a majority in the Constituent Assembly, which was closed down by the Bolsheviks in January 1918.

* They were lishentsy (literally meaning the ‘disenfranchised’) – a category of people, mainly from the old intelligentsia, the petty bourgeoisie and the clergy, deprived of civil and electoral rights. During the 1920s the lishentsy were subjected to a growing level of discrimination by the Bolsheviks, with many families denied access to Soviet schools and state housing or deprived of ration cards.

*How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–4), Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel about the establishment of Soviet power and the heroic life of a Komsomol activist, Pavel Korchagin, which inspired many Soviet children in the 1930s and 1940s.

* Growing up in Rome, where she was born in 1924, Elena Volkonskaia recalls her mother using the same phrase. Born in 1893, Elena’s mother was the daughter of Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia 1906–11, and another graduate of the Smolny Institute (interview with Elena Volkonskaia, Cetona, July 2006).

* The Old Believers were adherents of the Russian Orthodox rituals observed before the Church reforms of the 1650s had brought them closer into line with those of the Greek Orthodox liturgy.

* The government encouraged people to cremate their dead in secular Soviet ceremonies by providing free state cremations, but according to one morgue official in the early 1920s, ‘the Russians are still either too religious or too superstitious to part from the Orthodox burial traditions’ (GARF, f. 4390, op. 12, d. 40, l. 24).

* They christened him Kirill and called him that throughout his life, but when he embarked on his literary career, in the 1930s, he changed his name to Konstantin, because he found it awkward to pronounce his r’s. For the sake of clarity we shall call him Konstantin throughout the text.

* Fania and Iakov went to Iurev (Tartu) University in Estonia, one of the few universities in the Empire to admit Jews before 1917.

* Jews were allowed to live outside the Pale of Settlement if they were merchants of the first guild, exceptionally talented craftsmen, university students or qualified pharmacists.

* The term ‘kulak’, derived from the word for a ‘fist’, was originally used by the peasants to distinguish exploitative elements (usurers, sub-renters of land, wheeler-dealers and so on) from the farming peasantry. An entrepreneurial peasant farmer, in their view, could not be a ‘kulak’, even if he hired labour. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, misused the term in a Marxist sense to describe any rich peasant. They equated the ‘kulak’ with a ‘capitalist’ on the false assumption that the use of hired labour in peasant farming (which was extremely rare in most of Russia) was a form of ‘capitalism’ (as opposed to a way of making up for shortages of labour on the farm). During the Civil War the Bolsheviks attempted to stir up class war in the countryside and requisition grain by organizing the landless peasants (mainly urban types) into