Stalin's Children (13 page)

All in all, among a generation which had survived the famines, the Purges and the war, Lenina and Lyudmila could count themselves among the lucky. They had their lives, and each other. All around them were those who had lost much more. Perhaps that is why the sisters were not torn apart by experiences so traumatic that it seems, to us, almost inconceivable to have survived. Mila had lived when the Spanish children with her had died; Lenina found her sister by pure chance when thousands of children never did. That was already plenty to be grateful for.

Also, undoubtedly, Lenina and Lyudmila's survival had something to do with the natural resilience of children, their ability to live in the moment. Blind to the wider world, they lived their lives in terms of the here and now, which is perhaps the most powerful weapon there is against despair. And, for Mila at least, there was the great, shielding ignorance of the past she had lost, buried in the hazy half-memories of childhood which made the reality of prison and orphanage a given, something to be endured but at least not regretted, or understood. She had been scarred, physically and mentally, but not broken. The Hershey's chocolate and corned beef healed her body, and her spirit was intact, and ready to take on the world.

Soon after Lyudmila's return from Solikamsk, a young tank captain named Alexander Vasin paid a visit to the Bibikov apartment on Taganskaya Square. Yakov's wife Varvara was his aunt. Lenina was there, and shyly greeted her distant cousin. Alexander - Sasha - was healthy and handsome, with a winning smile and a loud laugh. He looked splendid in his olive-green uniform, with breeches and soft officers' boots, epaulettes and crew-cut blond hair.

Lenina and Sasha had met briefly in 1937 during Lenina's first visit to Moscow, just after her father's arrest. Sasha joked how pretty his young cousin had become. Sasha offered to see her to the Metro as she left for work. Half jokingly, he flirted and tickled her on the Metro escalator, saying that he would like to marry her. They met again a few days later, on their first date, in Krasnopresnensky Park, near the Zoo. He took her to a café in the park, the first time in her life Lenina had ever been to a restaurant of any sort. Thirty-six years later, after Sasha's death of a heart attack, his colleagues arranged his wake, by coincidence, in the same restaurant.

After two weeks of courtship, Sasha had to go back to his unit. He proposed marriage to Lenina before he left, and she accepted.

Three days after he had left Moscow, as Sasha's car neared the front line west of Smolensk, it hit an anti-tank mine. His leg was shredded and had to be amputated at the knee with a wood saw. He was flown to one of the giant military hospitals in Ivanovo to recover. From there, Sasha wrote Lenina a strange letter. He told his fiancée that he had been in a fire and was burned and disfigured, and that she should find someone else to marry. When she got the letter Lenina ran to her uncle. Yakov, pulling strings, arranged a seat for Lenina on an American Douglas transport plane to Ivanovo, and instructed the crew to prepare to bring a wounded man back with them to Moscow. Lenina found the hospital and as she ran up the steps she saw Sasha standing in his underwear on crutches in the hospital yard, not burned but missing a leg. Lenina brought him back to Moscow and they were married three months later. She was nineteen, he was twenty-six. Strangely, after a marriage that lasted nearly four decades, Lenina cannot now remember which leg he had lost.

I remember Sasha as an overwhelmingly masculine presence, strong-jawed and decisive, with an explosive laugh and a manner which brooked no nonsense. He was in many ways a perfect Soviet man, bluff and cheerful, always seeing the good even when confronted, as every Soviet citizen constantly was, with incompetence and ugliness.

In many ways, I think, he was the opposite of his young sister-in-law Lyudmila, She was ambitious and uncompromising, always seeking to shape the world around her. He was content with simple pleasures: the respect of his friends and colleagues, his small apartment, the dacha which he built with his own hands from scrounged planks and bricks. He also knew the power of his good looks. It was as though Sasha felt that his virility was a gift which it was his duty to share among a generation of women where men were in short supply. But he never gave Lenina, who was terribly jealous, any reason to suspect infidelity. 'Maybe he was unfaithful,' she used to say of him in approval. 'But he made sure I never, ever, knew a thing.'

Moscow in the closing months of the 'Great Patriotic War' was a city close to exhaustion. Far to the west, the Red Army fought through eastern Prussia to beat the Western Allies to Berlin. But back home, the women and children waged a more banal war against hunger and cold among the ruins of a country wrecked by the war effort. They worried about their men at the front, their fear of terrible news made all the more poignant by the imminent certainty of victory.

The streets were filled with men in uniform, the evenings were dark because street lighting was, like everything else, rationed. Life was suspended pending the war's end, everyone concentrating on survival, not daring to think of the future. Daily existence revolved around little cardboard ration cards and rumours. Varvara and her daughter stood for hours in queues at street corners on the promise of an imminent delivery of food; Lenina scrounged milk from maternity hospitals to take to her always-ravenous little sister Lyudmila. In the evenings Lenina and Sasha sat by their big radio listening to the announcer reeling off strings of Soviet victories in places with German-sounding names, and felt righteous and pleased.

Lenina was selfishly happy that her Sasha was alive, unlike the sweethearts of so many of her girlfriends at the Khodinskoye airfield. The young couple were allocated a tiny apartment in the basement of a pre-revolutionary mansion on Herzen Street. It was cramped and the small windows were high in the wall, but it was Lenina's first home since childhood, and she was determined to make it comfortable for her new little family.

The kitchen became Lenina's kingdom, and food was the currency of her love. A lifetime after she began to cook for herself in the tiny stove on Herzen Street, I would sit in my aunt's kitchen on Frunzenskaya Embankment, and she would feed me the same dishes she'd first learned to cook for Sasha sour cabbage soup, pea soup, beef cutlets and fried potatoes. As I ate, she'd watch me closely for signs of appreciation. For both Lenina and my mother, food and happiness were to be closely intertwined.

In January 1945, shortly before her eleventh birthday, Lyudmila was deemed to have recovered sufficiently to be discharged from the children's home at Malakhovka. But there wasn't space for her in Lenina's one-room Herzen Street apartment. Lenina was already pregnant with her first child, and Sasha's sister Tamara was sleeping on a folding bed in the kitchen. Lenina called her aunt Varvara, but she also refused to take in Lyudmila - 'Another scrounger on the phone,' she told her husband when he asked who was calling. So Sasha helped find Lyudmila a place in an orphanage at Saltykovka, twenty-five miles outside Moscow. Lyudmila took with her a single cardboard suitcase filled with American Red Cross clothes, some children's books, and a doll.

Saltykovka is a pleasant, sleepy little place. My mother and I went to visit on a dusty summer afternoon in 1988. We took the
elektrichka,
as my mother had often done as a child, from Kursky Station. The platform at Saltykovka was a single strip of concrete, and after the train had clanked away down its narrow canyon cut through the birch forest the only sounds were of birds and the distant revving of an engine.

'It hasn't changed at all,' my mother announced as we walked, arm in arm, along the single unpaved street which ran through the village. The wooden houses were ramshackle, painted green or dull yellow, and at the end of the street stood the grand orphanage gates. Picket fences, leaning at drunken angles, framed tiny allotments and the houses were halfhidden by outsize sunflowers and jasmine bushes running wild.

The old buildings of the orphanage where my mother had spent most of her childhood stood on the edge of the forest. The current generation of orphans was away at summer camp; the place was deserted. It had the melancholy feel of children's institutions when the children are away, an air of regimented jollity, and the poignancy of children's loneliness.

Yet Mila was happy at Saltykovka, as happy as anywhere else she could remember. She went to her first normal school, and loved it. Her years of enforced idleness in hospital beds had taught her to love books, and Lenina would bring her novels from Yakov's library, which she read voraciously. The schoolmistresses were strict and dedicated, pedagogues of the old school, drilling their pupils in correct Russian grammar and the works of Pushkin. On Sundays, soldiers would come and take the children to a nearby cinema in big army trucks.

Mila remembers sitting for hours on the lap of the elderly peasant woman who stoked the bath-house furnace as she combed out the lice from the children's hair. One of the teachers, Maria Nikolaevna Kharlamova, spent hours of her own time coaching my mother in Russian literature and history.

When my mother and I knocked on Maria Nikolaevna's door she recognized my mother immediately, and burst into tears.

'Milochkal Can it be you?' she kept repeating as they embraced.

Maria Nikolaevna fussed over tea and home-made jam for us both, then as we sat at her kitchen table she hunted through piles of old papers to retrieve a little envelope of local newspaper clippings she had kept on Lyudmila - news of her admission to Moscow University, news of her prizewinning 'Red Diploma' on graduation.

'I was so proud of you!' Maria Nikolaevna whispered, staring across the rickety table at her star pupil with all the satisfaction of an elderly mother. 'I was proud of all of you.'

Mila also spent months at a time away from Saltykovka, enduring painful operations on her leg and hip in the Botkin Hospital in central Moscow. The deformities wreaked by her childhood tuberculosis had left one leg sixteen centimetres shorter than the other, and when she was fifteen the Botkin surgeons had to break the bone and put weights on Lyudmila's leg to make it grow longer.

When she was allowed back from the oppressive silence of the hospital wards to the clamour of Saltykovka, Mila threw herself into games and group activities. She was always a leader, a Young Pioneer 'Activist', a leader of the Communist version of the Scouts or Guides, with a special badge on her white shirt to show her status. 'In place of arms, we have steel wings; In place of a heart, a fiery engine,' went a stirring song of the time, and Mila, despite her disability, tried hard to live up to the ideal.

Mila was outspoken, too, and thoughtful. Both were dangerous habits, even in school. One day shortly after the end of the war, during an obligatory classroom reading of the editorial page of
Pionerskaya Pravda
(the children's version of the great Party newspaper), the teacher recited the new anti- American rhetoric. Mila put up her hand in the approved Pioneer fashion - fingers pointing straight up to the ceiling, elbow on the desk - to ask a question.

'But the Americans helped us a lot during the war, didn't they?' she asked.

The teacher was horrified and sent Mila immediately to the headmaster, who hastily convened a session of the
druzina,
a supposedly informal children's court which was the junior equivalent of a Party meeting. Dutifully assembled, Mila's classroom colleagues pronounced that she must be more attentive to political education, and formally censured her. It was not the only time she would face such a hypocrites' court.

There was a burning will in that crippled little body, even then. Later, she wrote to her future husband, my father, of her refusal to compromise, to accept the realities of Soviet life. 'I want life to show me in practice the strength of my principles,' she wrote. 'I want it, I want it, I want it.' In a world where the most her contemporaries aspired to was to get by, to do the best they could with what they had, Mila believed that her will could conquer the world. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko called the anti-hero of his and Mila's generation 'Comrade Kompromis Kompromisovich' in sardonic tribute to the men and women who negotiated their way through the hypocrisy and disappointments of Soviet life by a million small compromises. Mila was not one of them.

Despite her crippled leg, Mila became skipping champion of her class. At Saltykovka she organized class lice checks and hikes, singing sessions and games of hopscotch. When she visited her sister on Herzen Street she'd throw herself into the street's hopscotch championships, chalking the boxes on the asphalt with the neighbours' children. Lyudmila almost always emerged as the winner, even on one occasion when she had to compete with a broken arm in a plaster cast.

* * *

News of victory came sonorously over the radio on 9 May 1945. Lenina heard the radio announcement at the Dynamo factory. She remembers feeling infinite relief, and an overwhelming weariness. A few days later there was a parade of German prisoners down the Garden Ring road, and Lenina went to the top of Herzen Street to see the enemy at first hand. The crowds watched in silence. She noticed the strong smell of the leather of the German prisoners' boots and webbing. They walked in good order, expressionless. The prisoners were followed ostentatiously by trucks spraying the street to wash away the contagion of the Fascist presence. Fewer than one in ten of the prisoners would ever return to their homeland.

Yakov moved his family into a larger, more stylish apartment. He had acquired a trophy Mercedes looted from Germany on a trip otherwise devoted to dismantling German rocketry laboratories and shipping them back wholesale to the Lavochkin Construction Bureau in Moscow. The Mercedes was a huge black shining beast, the mark of giddying rank. Yakov would drive around Moscow giving lifts to young girls in his car, a pastime which Varvara eventually discovered and which threw her into violent frenzies of jealousy. Yakov's new job as head of the Soviet Union's fledgling rocket programme, staffed by captured German scientists, opened a world of privilege to his family, which they were in no hurry to share with their poor relatives. For Lenina and Lyudmila, the drabness of wartime austerity continued for years after the end of the war. But there were plenty of bright parades full of gaudy paper slogans and banners, and a great sense of pride and achievement. Whenever Lenina and Sasha, medals arrayed on his chest, would walk with their new baby Nadia it seemed that she had, at last, escaped the wreckage of her childhood.