Stalin's Children (9 page)

We were all caught up in it now, the momentum, the grinding wheels. My foreignness meant all this was to be done by the book. The file, the all-important file. We were all forced to follow its course now, step by step, because what had been written could not be unwritten.

The two men spent eleven and a half months in the Butirskaya Prison, one of the most notorious jails in Russia, waiting for a trial date. I eventually got a summons to the trial, but was too scared to go. A friend went instead, to present my excuses. He heard that both brothers had come down with tuberculosis in jail. Even in the absence of the victim, they were convicted, and given a sentence matching the time they'd already served on remand. They had lost their jobs and their families had gone back to Tatarstan. By the time I heard the news the shock and even the memory of the night our lives collided so disastrously had faded. The story was lost, I tried to convince myself, in the Babel of horror stories which swirled in the newsroom where I worked. It was perverse, I told myself, to mourn the fate of guilty men when every day the papers which piled on my desk in drifts were full of terrifying stories of the suffering of innocents.

But the memory of the horror and the guilt I felt as those two men grovelled before me was buried deep, and it festered. Many Russians, I believe, carry a similar black slime inside themselves made of trauma and guilt and wilful forgetting. It makes a rich compost in which all their hedonism, their treachery, their every pleasure and betrayal, takes root. It's not the same for the cosseted Europeans among whom I grew up, though many of them were convinced they had suffered parental indifference, spousal cruelty or personal failure. No, the average Russian seventeen-year-old, I concluded from my years of wandering the nastier side of the new Russia, had already seen more real abuse and hopelessness and corruption and injustice than most of my English friends had seen in a lifetime. And to survive and be happy, Russians have so much to bury, to wilfully ignore. Small wonder that the intensity of their pleasures and indulgences is so sharp; it has to match the quality of their suffering.

For days after the Bibikovs' Chernigov apartment was searched there was no news. Boris did not return from his holiday. The NKVD kept telling Martha that she would be informed as soon as there were any developments. Varya was sent away to her relatives in the country, and Martha and her two daughters lived in the apartment's bathroom and the kitchen because all the other rooms were locked and sealed. Martha bought food with the money she had left in her purse, and accepted the charity of their remaining neighbours.

Bibikov's colleagues knew nothing - in fact many had themselves disappeared, and the rest were either terrified or naïvely confident that the NKVD would soon correct its error.

There was a moment of panic when Martha left the children alone to eat their cherry soup, a Ukrainian summer treat, while she went once again to the NKVD office for news. Lenina was reading a book her father had given her, and didn't notice that her little sister Lyudmila had stuffed all the cherry stones up her nose so far that they could not be extracted.

'I'm a money box,' Lyudmila told her sister as she pushed up another stone. There was uproar when their mother returned. Lyudmila was rushed to hospital to have the stones extracted by a stern nurse with long forceps apparently kept for the purpose. Lenina was given a hard smacking for her negligence, and wept because she could not go to her father for comfort.

After nearly two weeks of worry, Martha decided the only thing left to do was to send Lenina to Moscow to her husband's well-connected brothers. Surely they could pull some strings and find out something about what had happened? She had no money to buy a ticket, so she wrapped a pair of silver spoons from the kitchen in a napkin and went to the station to beg a seat from a conductress on one of the Kiev-Moscow expresses which passed through Chernigov late at night. The conductress stowed Lenina on a luggage rack and told her not to move. She also told Martha to keep the spoons. Martha ran down the platform as the train pulled out, keeping pace as it gathered speed until she couldn't keep up any more.

Ten years before, Martha's father had sent her away from the home where she'd grown up. On a station platform in Simferopol, she had abandoned her dying sister to her fate. Now, as she stood watching the lights of the train bearing her elder daughter to Moscow recede into the night, Martha realized that the new family she had made was falling apart. She went to the telegraph office and sent a short telegram to her husband's relatives in Moscow telling them that Lenina was on her way. Then she walked home. She found Lyudmila asleep on a blanket on the kitchen floor, picked her up in her arms and, she told Lenina later, 'howled like a wounded animal'.

At Kursky Station in Moscow Lenina was met by her uncle Isaac, Boris's younger brother. Their other brother, Yakov, an Air Force officer, was serving on the Far Eastern Staff in Khabarovsk, near Vladivostok, and was still unaware of Boris's arrest. Isaac was twenty-three, a promising engineer at the Dynamo aircraft engine factory. He embraced his young niece and told her to save her story till after they'd ridden home on the tram to the small apartment he shared with his and Boris's mother, Sophia. In the kitchen they listened to Lenina's story in silence. Lenina began crying, sobbing that she didn't know what her father had done wrong. Isaac tried to reassure her. It was all a misunderstanding, he told her, he knew people who could sort it out.

The next day Isaac spoke to a friend of his at the Dynamo factory, one of the resident NKVD political officers. The man had until recently been one of the personal bodyguards of a senior NKVD general. The political officer said he'd ask his old colleagues and see if he could arrange an interview to sort out what he was tactful enough to call a 'terrible mistake'.

Two days later, Isaac came home early, told Lenina to put on her best summer dress and took her by the hand to the tram stop. They travelled to the NKVD's headquarters on Lubyanka Square in silence. The Lubyanka itself was a huge and bourgeois building which had once housed a pre-revolutionary insurance company. By 1937 it had been extended, its cellars converted to a sizeable prison and interrogation centre which was by then bursting with the Purge's nightly crop of new victims. Isaac and his niece went in to the main entrance, presented Isaac's passport to the desk sergeant and were shown upstairs to a waiting room. A man in a dark green NKVD uniform, with breeches and leather boots, came to speak briefly to Isaac - evidently the friend who had arranged the meeting.

When they were finally shown in to the office Lenina first thought it was empty. There was a huge dark wooden desk, with a bright lamp on it. The heavy curtains were half drawn, despite the summer sunshine outside. There were tall windows and a thick carpet. And then she noticed, behind the desk, a small, balding, bespectacled head. The general, Lenina thought, 'looked like a gnome'.

The gnome looked up at Isaac and the little girl, and asked why they were there. Isaac, faltering, began to explain that his brother, a good and loyal Communist, had been arrested due to some mistake, some oversight, perhaps excessive zeal on the part of his men in rooting out the enemies of the state. The general picked up a flimsy file from his desk as he listened, flipped through it as Isaac talked, and said one word:
'Razberemsya'
- 'We'll sort it out.' That was the end of the meeting. Isaac, shaken, took Lenina home and the next day put her on a train back to Chernigov. A few days later, Martha sold whatever kitchenware she could and bought train tickets for herself and her children to the Crimea, to stay with her elder sister Feodosia. But before she left she dutifully filed her whereabouts with the Chernigov NKVD, so that her husband wouldn't worry when he returned to an empty apartment after the misunderstanding was rectified.

Winter closed in, and there was still no news. Martha and the children lived in the kitchen of Feodosia's small wooden house on the outskirts of Simferopol. It was a rude fall from grace after their life as members of the pampered Party élite in Chernigov. Martha got a job as a nurse in a children's hospital for infectious diseases, and would bring leftover food from the hospital home for the children.

The climate of the Crimea is milder than European Russia, but the winter brings a cold sea wind off the Bay of Sevastopol. Feodosia's draughty house was heated with a small metal stove known as a
burzhuika
- a 'bourgeois' stove which burned hot and quickly, but was cold by morning. The children weren't allowed to light it during the day while Martha was at the hospital, and they sat by the window, huddled in sweaters, watching the rain fall on the small orchard which surrounded their house.

Life was elsewhere, Lenina thought, during those slow months. She missed the bustle of their life in Chernigov, their neighbours and her school friends and the endless stream of officials and friends who would sit late into the night in their kitchen. But most of all she missed her father, who had been her refuge and her best friend. She never stopped believing that he was alive and well, somewhere, missing her as she missed him.

Lyudmila had always been a quiet child, but now she seemed to withdraw into herself. She played with her dolls in a corner of the floor of Feodosia's kitchen, next to the trunk on which Lenina slept, trying to stay out of the way of her scolding mother and aunt. Martha came home late and exhausted, her hair a straggling mess. Since her husband's arrest she had given up on her appearance.

In early December Lyudmila fell ill with measles. It seems she had caught it from the food, or maybe from her mother's hospital clothes. As the child's fever climbed Martha stayed at home to look after her. She would send Lenina to the chemist for mustard plasters to ease her sister's coughing, and eye drops for her swollen eyes.

On the third or fourth night of Lyudmila's fever there was a sharp knock on the door. Feodosia went to open it. Several men in dark uniforms with pistols on their belts pushed inside the house. They demanded to see 'Citizen Bibikova'. Martha, Lyudmila in her arms, scrambled to her feet as they opened the kitchen door.

'Get up!' one of the men ordered Lenina, and threw open the trunk she had been sleeping on, spilling her and the blankets on to the floor. Martha began to scream in protest, grabbing the officer by the arm. He pushed her backwards, toppling her into the open trunk with her three-year-old daughter in her arms. Lenina remembers the screaming, everyone screaming, her mother struggling to get up from the trunk, a moment of grotesque farce within the unfolding nightmare. The NKVD men pulled Martha out, held her arms behind her back and bundled her out of the house and into the garden, still in her nightdress. On the street they pushed her into one of two police cars ' Black Crows' - waiting for them. Another officer followed with the two children, Lyudmila under his arm and leading Lenina by the hand. As they reached the street, Lenina struggled free from the grip of the man who held her and tried to run to her mother; she was caught and bundled with her sister into the second car. As they drove away Lenina clutched her feverish little sister, who was crying hysterically. At the end of the street the two cars turned in different directions. The girls were not to see their mother again for eleven years.

My own son, Nikita, is, as I write this, exactly Lyudmila's age when Martha was arrested - two months shy of four years old. He has a round face and a mop of dark hair, and his grandmother Lyudmila's striking blue eyes. Lenina, when we went to visit a few weeks ago, hugged him so tight that he cried; she said he looked so like Lyudmila she couldn't bear it. 'I became a mother at twelve, when they took Mother away,' she said. 'Lyudmila was my first child. He's a little Lyudmila.'

Sometimes, as I watch Nikita play, I feel-like most parents, I suppose - a flash of obscure, irrational fear. As he potters in the flowerbeds rooting for snails or digging up bulbs, absorbed in his own thoughts, I fear that my child could die, or be somehow taken from me. At other times, usually when it's late at night and I'm drunk and far from home, on assignment in Baghdad or another of the Godforsaken hell-holes where I've spent much of my life since leaving Moscow, I imagine what will happen to him if I die. I wonder if he'll manage, what he'll remember of me, if he'll understand, if he'll cry. The thought of losing him is so horrifying it makes me giddy. I often think of Martha on that night and try to imagine how I would feel if it were Nikita snatched away from my arms by strangers. But I cannot picture it.

The NKVD men drove Lenina and Lyudmila to the Simferopol Prison for Underage Offenders, where they were to remain until the state determined their fate. By the grim logic of the Purge, the family members of an 'enemy of the people' were deemed to have been contaminated by his or her heresy, as if it were a disease. As the old Russian saying goes, 'the apple does not fall far from the apple tree'. Therefore these two children, aged twelve and three, were doomed to suffer for their father's sin. Like him, they were ordained by the Party to become the dross of history.

The prison was badly lit, and stank of urine, carbolic soap and coal-tar ointment. Lenina remembers the faces of the men who took down their details, the acrid smell of the crowded cell to which they were taken and told to find a space for themselves on the straw-covered floor, and the barking of the guard dogs in the corridor. Holding her moaning little sister, she cried herself to sleep.

Mila also remembers the night of her mother's arrest. It is her earliest clear memory. She is standing in her nightshirt holding a doll, a soldier pushes her, and everyone screams. Of her brief three years and ten months of normal family life she has no recollection, except for a ghost of a memory of being carried on her father's shoulders. From that moment on, Lenina became her little sister's surrogate mother. Two frightened children alone in a world that had suddenly become dark and incomprehensible.