THE YEAR MY FATHER WAS ARRESTED
Moscow, USSR, 1937
I was born in April 1937. My mother, who spoke several languages, was teaching Russian to foreigners at the time. My father was deputy head of the Main Administration of the Automobile and Tractor Industry. At the end of 1936 there was an automobile exhibition in America, and the head of the administration, Dybets, went there for the exhibition. He returned at the end of 1936 and was immediately arrested and accused of espionage. My father, as his deputy, was arrested in August. So I was born in April, and in August my father was arrested.
A month later they came for my mother. There was only my mother and me in the apartment, lying in my crib.
Fortunately for us—God truly protected us—a young man came in, saw the baby in the crib, and asked, “Who is this?” My mother said, “This is my daughter.” He called someone and said, “There is a small child here.” Apparently, the person on the other end replied, “So what?” And he said, “But we have this regulation.” That man saved our family, because my mother was not arrested.
Instead, she was moved out of our beautiful apartment and into a basement room. She had to report for interrogation every month, and later she was exiled. She was not imprisoned. We stayed with our nanny. And once again, that was our good fortune: the nanny who had been with me when this disaster happened went to work at a factory and did not abandon our family. She was a very beautiful woman. Her name was Liza.
“I was born in April. In August, my father was arrested.”
When my mother was taken away and sent into exile, they came that same evening for me and my brother, who was eight years older than I was. They wanted to take us to an orphanage. But our nanny fell to her knees and begged them to let us stay until morning. Literally on her knees. The next morning my father’s younger brother came and took us away. That saved our family from being separated, because otherwise we might never have found one another again and never have seen our parents. I was taken in by my father’s older brother.
I was about that age when my father disappeared—when he was taken away. At that age I lived in Perlovka, outside Moscow, with my father’s older brother.
Later they hired a nanny, and she took us to my mother in Kazakhstan, where she was living in exile in the settlement of Issyk. At first she taught Russian language and literature at a school. Then a kindergarten was organized in the settlement, and my mother turned out to be the only educated person who really understood how to run things, so she was appointed head of the kindergarten. There was terrible hunger, and the kindergarten staff asked her to let them take potato peelings and vegetable scraps. She allowed it at her own risk, even though it was forbidden, and she worried terribly about it.
When my mother’s term of exile ended, we went to live with her older brother, who had been in a camp since 1937 and had served ten years. In 1948 he settled in the village of Zheleznodorozhny, near Knyazhpogost station in the Komi ASSR. My mother and I went there. By then he was working at the camp as a civilian employee.
My uncle had been deputy editor-in-chief of the newspaper Izvestia and lived in the House on the Embankment. Everyone who lived there, in the House on the Embankment, was arrested and imprisoned. He was among them. My mother’s younger brother had been arrested in 1935, strangely enough. He served a year and was released, and nothing more happened to him. He got off relatively lightly. We were living with my mother’s older brother, and I went to school there. Two years later he was arrested again and sent to Kazakhstan, where he served another ten years. Altogether, my older uncle spent twenty years in prison and the camps.
I understood that something terribly unjust and horrifying had happened to my family only after that second arrest. I knew that something was going on—I remembered that my mother and I had been there, that later we had traveled somewhere—but I did not really understand it. After my mother’s brother was arrested for the second time, she had to explain everything to me from the very beginning.
Of course, we were evicted from our apartment. We were put in a barracks, in a four-square-meter room. At first my mother and I lived in that four-square-meter room. There were twenty rooms in the barracks. When a nine-square-meter room became available, we moved into it, and that felt like happiness and joy. We even took one of my school friends in to live with us because her father had been arrested and sent to the North. We were already in the tenth grade, and so that she would not have to interrupt her studies, we took her in.
I should say that by nature I was a cheerful child. Nothing really weighed on me. Even the fact that I had nothing to wear, that clothes constantly had to be altered for me, did not bother me at all. I never felt deprived because I was surrounded by love. My mother was there. Later my mother’s older sister, who had served ten years, came to live in the same barracks.
The people who lived in that barracks were unlike anyone I ever met again. There was a famous Moscow clarinetist, a well-known Moscow lawyer, Moscow doctors. The hospital in that settlement had extraordinary people working in it—the very best medical professionals. My aunt was a surgical nurse and worked in that hospital, and people were brought there for treatment from all over Komi.
At school, physics and chemistry were taught by a pair of Moscow scientists. Mathematics was taught by an associate professor from Kyiv University. Russian language and literature were taught by a wonderful woman from St. Petersburg whom I still adore to this day.
And the people who gathered in our barracks invented an Aesopian language right in front of me. They called the “camp” the “academy.” But I figured out that language very quickly and told my mother, “You can speak openly and call everything by its real name now—I’ve already deciphered everything.” Despite everything, my memories of living in that settlement are very bright and even joyful.
My mother did not know what had happened to my father. She kept going to offices, writing letters... Finally we received a notice. At first they told her that he had been sentenced to ten years without the right of correspondence, and later that he had died in a camp. In reality, he had been executed two or three months after his arrest. I searched for his grave in Moscow, at that cemetery, but I never found it. I do not know where they are buried... He was a very interesting, handsome man.
My mother was thirty-six. She was born in 1901. At eighteen—or perhaps nineteen—she completed courses in shorthand and touch typing. She worked in Paris at our consulate, and she often remembered Mayakovsky coming to visit them there. Apparently, it was a very good atmosphere, and the consul was a decent, good man.
She missed home terribly and decided to return. All my life I asked her, “Why did you come back? Why couldn’t you have stayed there?” She had suitors there too. She would say, “Well, then you wouldn’t have existed”—I also had an older brother. And I would say, “We would have existed; we just would have spoken French.” All my life I kept asking her, “Why didn’t you stay?”
I myself am officially considered rehabilitated, because as an infant I was exiled together with my mother. So I too am, in a sense, a victim of Stalinist repression.
When Stalin died and I came to school, my friend—the same friend who later lived with us—was sitting next to me. Everyone was in tears and overcome with grief. When I saw all those tear-streaked faces, I suddenly started laughing. I put my head down on the desk and laughed silently, but I could not stop. My friend tried to help me, but I simply couldn’t.
Then a teacher came over, put her hand on my back—she thought I was sobbing—and said, “Lenochka, calm down. We are all grieving, but you mustn’t cry so hard.” It was awful. Later they gathered us all in the assembly hall, and when the speeches began, I asked my friend, “Pinch me really hard, because otherwise the same thing is going to happen again.” She pinched me so hard that tears came to my eyes. That was the only way I managed to hold myself together.
When I was being admitted to the Komsomol at the age of fourteen, they told me that I had to renounce my father or they would not accept me. I stood up and said, “Then I would rather not join the Komsomol, if that is the condition.” They said, “No, no, no. What are you saying?” And I said, “I will never renounce my father.”
After Stalin’s death we returned to Moscow, but our apartment was not returned to us. My mother did not want anything from them. She said, “I want nothing from this regime!” We had once had a car and a beautiful apartment. They offered to pay two months of my father’s salary as compensation after his death. My mother refused everything.
We were given a fifteen-square-meter room in a communal apartment where eleven people lived.
And she never forgave them. Neither did I.
My mother’s oldest brother had entered the Sorbonne in early 1918, before the Revolution had fully unfolded. When everything began, his relatives told him not to return. When the war started, he joined the British Army. He became a British citizen and lived in England.
He came to Moscow, I think, in 1956, for the first international exhibition in Sokolniki. He arrived with some company—if I remember correctly, a sewing machine manufacturer—as an interpreter. Of course, we rushed to see him. He had searched for us and finally found us. He had even tried to send us parcels. When he came to Moscow, our connection was finally restored.
There was always a crowd around his booth with the sewing machines because he was a man who still spoke that old Russian language. He did not say “airplane”; he said “aeroplane.” He did not say “militiaman”; he said “policeman,” using the pre-Revolutionary term. His Russian had simply remained frozen in that earlier time, and people were always gathering around him.
His assistant was a young man who had graduated from Oxford and studied Russian. He spoke with a very strong accent and found the language quite difficult. My friend and I would come by, and they would let us into their booth. This young interpreter once said, “I admire Russians.”
I asked, “Why?” He said, “First, you eat ice cream in winter. And second, you live in communal apartments. I have my own house, and my neighbor has his. If I go out into the yard to do something and see my neighbor working near the fence, I won’t go over there—I won’t do anything there. So how do you manage to live like this?”
When my mother’s eldest brother visited us, we were living in a fifteen-square-meter room in a three-room communal apartment with eleven people. My mother’s brother and his wife had also come from Chelyabinsk to meet him. The older brother came with his wife, my aunt came with my cousin, and we all gathered there.
He would walk in and ask my mother, “All right, you enter through this door—but where do your neighbors enter?” My mother would say, “Through the same door.” “And this toilet that you use—where is the toilet for your neighbors?” “The same toilet.” And so on.
The next times he came to visit, he simply stopped using the toilet or the bathroom altogether. He was staying at the Metropol Hotel, and from then on he made sure he arrived fully prepared.
In London, he lived with his wife. They had no children. They had a five-room apartment with three toilets and everything else. And he would say, “I would very much like you to come and stay with us, but I can’t invite more than two of you.”
Meanwhile, we lived in fifteen square meters and still managed to accommodate my mother’s brother and his wife. He had a five-room apartment and could take only two people. The rest of us would have to come in turns.
Well... that is, essentially, the story of my life...