A FAMILY MARKED BY REPRESSION
The Soviet Union · Across Generations
You know, several years ago I received a letter in the mail saying that I had been randomly selected for jury duty. It also said that I was supposed to let them know if I had any conflict of interest.
And I immediately started thinking about this idea of a conflict of interest, and I realized that all four of my grandparents — as well as practically all of my close relatives of that generation — had, so to speak, criminal records. Many of them ended their lives in places of imprisonment. And I just smiled to myself...
In fact, I am very grateful to my parents and to my many relatives for never keeping this whole history a secret from me. I knew all of it from an early age.
I understood it. And most importantly, you know, a child... you do not necessarily have to sit down and explain everything directly to a child.
A child somehow absorbs things almost out of the air. He learns from experience, watches the people he loves and respects, and draws conclusions from which he builds himself in the world — and builds his own world out of fragments.
“My grandmother spent twenty years in camps and exile.
She was never broken.
She carried an unshakable moral strength —
and passed it on to us.”
I cannot even say that I had some kind of inner opposition, some kind of fronde, as people say. It was not really opposition. It was simply this: “Here are we, and there are they.” And perhaps for the first time that feeling — that there is “us” and there is “them” — disappeared briefly during the Yeltsin years, and then it came back again.
So, essentially, I lived my childhood and then the rest of my life with this feeling that there is “us” and there is “them.” And these two worlds are fairly hostile toward one another.
In fact, I valued and loved very deeply the people who lived around me. My dearly beloved grandmother... there were five of them in the family. In 1918, when the Revolution happened, all five of them... actually, no, the eldest brother had left earlier for England, and he lived in England. The other four brothers and sisters went to Moscow to build a new life.
They had these passionate hearts. They wanted change. They wanted something better. They were genuine people — strong, kind, with this deep sense of morality. They wanted to make life better. They rushed to Moscow in order to do all of that, and, naturally, as we all know, in the 1930s they were all caught in that machinery.
People like them were not needed by the new regime that was taking shape. They inevitably had to be ground down. And they were ground down physically, but not morally.
And one of the most important lessons I learned from my earliest childhood was this: I saw my grandmother, who spent twenty years in camps and exile, and she always carried herself with such dignity — she was upright in every sense of the word.
There was something in her... in that entire family there was a kind of inner core, absolutely unshakable moral principles, and a profound intellectual and cultural refinement. That smile of an intelligent, cultured person — I remember it from my earliest childhood.
You know how an aircraft identifies “friend or foe” by a signal? For me, that was the signal that told me: this person is one of us.
And all of them went through years and years — decades — of camps, and they were never broken. They managed to carry that feeling, that inner strength, forward to us. And I try to pass it on to my children.
When I grew older, I began reading books and asking questions about what I had read, asking for details. But I have to say that no one had much desire to discuss all the details.
There are some remarkable stories here. There is a wonderful book written by Tamara Petkevich, Life Is an Unmatched Boot. It came out in the early 1990s, and her fate intersected with the fate of my grandmother and my grandmother’s brother David.
Moreover, when my uncle and my mother got in touch with this woman... She had been an actress, and in this book she describes the hardships and suffering she endured in the camps. She became very emotional because it turned out that my grandmother’s brother David had literally saved her life in the camp.
After she gave birth to a child, she was practically dying in the common barracks. He stood up for her. He wrote a letter to one of the camp administrators asking that she be given help — and she was helped. He was respected there, even by the camp authorities.
And she gave us a copy of that letter. She had kept it her entire life. That was extremely moving for me.
These events are described in the book. I have a copy of that letter, which this woman kept throughout her whole life because she considered it a turning point in her life. In the book she also writes about my grandmother, and about what remarkable people they all were.
I heard many details about what life in exile was like. Of course, my mother told me many things. I mostly heard these stories from my mother and from my grandmother. There is probably little point in repeating all of them.
But I had not heard about certain things — about events that happened inside the camp.
My grandmother told me about her arrest, including how she was interrogated in prison. She was an extraordinarily intelligent and educated person. She knew eight languages.
And in order not to become anxious during the interrogation, she would simply sit there with the written protocol and correct the mistakes the investigator made.
And somehow that helped her because... You see, this was a person who had come into the world wanting to make the world better. So even correcting mistakes in an interrogation protocol contained, in a way, an element of making the world better. Somehow that helped save her.
I have many children, of different ages. I started telling these stories when my eldest daughter was eight. At that time the others were still very young... then, of course, they grew older.
You know, when we came here, I deliberately brought this album with me. This album contains all of our relatives who were swept up by all of this.
You could put a stamp on this entire album saying “Article 58” — with all its various subsections — because there are so many people here.
Here, for example, is my grandmother, her brothers and sisters, and their children. Every single person here spent time in camps, in exile, and so on. That is my grandmother’s side of the family. And then there is my grandfather himself.
You know, there was that famous exhibition in Berlin in 1930. At the time, my grandfather was, effectively, the deputy minister of the automobile and tractor industry.
The minister of the automobile and tractor industry — his superior — went to that exhibition. When he returned, he was immediately arrested as a German spy.
After that my grandfather began performing his duties, and before long he too was arrested and eventually executed.
That was on my mother’s side.
And on my father’s side, my other grandfather is here as well. His name was Kuzma. His real name was actually Musail, but nobody ever called him that. He was drafted into the army as soon as the war began. And already in August... we have documents showing that my other grandmother received a notice saying that he was missing in action.
For a very long time afterward she struggled terribly with two small children. She had two young children and no husband. And because all she had was this document saying that he was missing in action, she was completely deprived of any kind of financial support. She received no allowance, no pension, nothing. They suffered terribly, terribly. And then only in 1988, when we finally received documents from the relevant authorities, we discovered what had actually happened.
It turned out that my grandfather, together with a group of other soldiers, had been wounded, surrounded, and taken prisoner. They escaped from captivity and made their way back to Soviet lines. And some soldier told the NKVD that my grandfather spoke German. In fact, he spoke Yiddish, but whatever the case, they immediately seized him and began accusing him of various things.
He too was a hot-tempered man, and a very strong, large man. He grabbed an ashtray and threw it into the face of the NKVD officer who was accusing him. For that ashtray, he received ten years in the camps.
Meanwhile my grandmother, still holding this paper saying that he was missing in action, was trying to prove that he had died, because that was what some people who had seen him wounded had told her. Eventually she succeeded.
She had already begun receiving some money as the widow of a dead soldier — while all that time he was actually alive in a camp. And only in 1988 did we discover that he had in fact lived until 1945. He died in the camp during a fire. A barracks caught fire, and he was helping to put it out. He died while fighting that fire.
And when they eventually issued a death certificate, it said that he had died of cardiac arrest. But in the actual case file it says that he died while fighting the barracks fire. Today... well, in fact it has always been this way, but today even more than before, people in Russia are very fond of Stalin.
It is always Stalin, Stalin... the Stalin era, and so on. They glorify what existed in the Soviet Union. And you know, when a person has problems with their own sense of self, perhaps some kind of inferiority complex, it becomes very important for them to compensate for that and feel strong.
If they cannot feel strong on their own, then they feel strong through some leader. That is why in Russia the so-called “strong hand” has always been valued so highly. And then comes that old saying: when the forest is being cut down, the chips will fly. It seems to me that in today’s Russia, repression on the scale of Stalin’s time is entirely possible. Of course it is possible, because people are not prepared to resist it.
And more than that, people like the strong hand. Repression is part of the strong hand. Unfortunately, humanity is not prepared to learn from history, and all of this keeps repeating itself again and again, in different forms and from different angles. All of this is, of course, very sad.
But I do believe that society has become more moral than it was a thousand years ago. I think that is important.And that is also one of the reasons why I brought this album with me from Moscow.
We were not able to take very many things with us at the time. We literally packed only a few suitcases, and this heavy album took up half of one of mine. But I believed it was fundamentally important. I wanted my children not to become detached from their roots, and not to become detached from this experience.
I wanted at least my children to grow up learning the lessons of our history. And unfortunately... or rather, fortunately, we have this lesson. But unfortunately, we are not very good at learning it.