Authors: Owen Matthews
Stalin's Children (3 page)
'Be good, look after your mother and sister,' he whispered to Lenina.
He silenced his wife with a quick embrace, exchanged a few parting words with her, grabbed his packed case and lunch and ran downstairs. Lenina rushed to the window and saw her father's driver standing by the car, smoking a cigarette, which he tossed away as he heard his boss coming down the stone staircase. Lenina waved frantically as her beloved Papa climbed into his car, and he waved back, quickly, a sweeping gesture more like a salute. It was the last time she ever saw him.
After she had seen her husband off, Martha went across the landing to see if anything was wrong with the neighbours. She hadn't heard the usual thud of their door closing as the family went to work in the morning, and nobody had come home for lunch. When Martha returned Lenina noticed she was pale and nervous. There had been no response when she rang their doorbell. Then she'd seen a stamped paper pasted on to the door bearing the seal of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD. She knew immediately what it meant. The Bibikovs' neighbours, the family of a colleague of her husband's, had been arrested in the night.
The next morning there was a tiredness in Martha's eyes as she dressed little Lyudmila, a peremptoriness in her tone as she dragooned the children for a shopping expedition, squashing cotton summer cloche hats on to their heads.
On the way to the market, Martha stopped to tie little Lyudmila's shoelace. As she crouched, a young girl about Lenina's age walked silently up to them. She leaned over to Martha's ear and whispered something, then walked hurriedly away. Instead of standing up, Martha sank down on to her knees on the pavement like a shot animal. Her children tried to help her up, alarmed. In a few moments she recovered, stood, and turned back home, dragging Lyudmila as she stumbled to keep pace. Years later, Martha told Lenina what the girl had said: 'Tonight they will come with a search warrant.' Nobody knew who the girl was, or who had sent her.
Back in the apartment, Martha began to cry. She had been parted from her husband only once in their twelve years of marriage, when he went away to serve in the Red Army soon after they had met. And now he was gone, and the world they had made was about to fly apart.
That night the children went to bed hungry after a supper of kitchen scraps their mother had hurriedly thrown together. Martha couldn't sleep, she told Lenina later, and spent half the night doing laundry. Then she sat by the open window listening for the sound of a car. She fell asleep just before dawn, and never heard it.
Martha was woken by a sharp knocking on the door. She looked at her watch; it was just after four in the morning. Martha pulled on a dressing gown and opened the door. Four men stood outside, all wearing black leather jackets with pistol belts, and leather boots. Their officer showed her a search warrant and an arrest warrant for her husband. He asked if Bibikov was at home. Martha said no, he was away, and began pleading for an explanation. The men pushed past her and started to search the apartment. The children were woken by the sound of voices. Lyudmila began crying. A man opened the door of their room, switched on the light briefly, looked around and told the children to be quiet. Lyudmila got into bed with Lenina and cried herself back to sleep. Their mother distractedly came in to comfort them to the sounds of drawers being rifled through and cupboards emptied in the next room.
The men stayed for twelve hours, systematically searching every book, every file in Boris's study. The men did not allow Martha to go to the kitchen to feed the children. Lenina remembers their faces, 'hard as their leather coats'. When they had finished the search, confiscating a boxful of documents they made Martha sign for, the NKVD officers sealed the apartment's four rooms and left Martha and her children in the kitchen, still in their nightdresses. As the door slammed shut, Martha collapsed on the floor in tears. Lyudmila and Lenina also began bawling, hugging their mother.
When Martha managed to pull herself together, she went into the bathroom and wrung out a wet dress. Wiping her face in the bathroom mirror, she told Lenina to look after her sister, and left the house. She ran to the local NKVD headquarters, sure that their family had been the victim of some terrible mistake. She came back to the children late that night, empty-handed and desperate. She had found out almost nothing, except that she was just one of dozens of panicking wives who had besieged the stony-faced receptionist with questions about their missing husbands, only to be told that the men were 'under investigation' and that the women would be kept informed.
Though Martha didn't know it at the time, her husband was still a free man, relaxing in a first-class sleeper coach heading south and innocently looking forward to his well-earned days of rest at the Party sanatorium.
Lads, let's fulfil the Plan!
Slogan chalked on the factory
toilet wall by Boris Bibikov
There are only two surviving photographs of Boris Bibikov.
One is an informal group shot taken at the Kharkov Tractor Factory around 1932. He is sitting on the ground in front of two dozen fresh-faced, beaming young workers, his arm around the shoulder of a crew-cut young man. Bibikov is wearing a rumpled, open-necked shirt and his head is shaven, in the proletarian style affected by many of his generation of Party cadres. Unlike everyone else in the photo, there is no smile on his face, only a severe glare.
The other photo, from his Party card, was taken early in 1936. Bibikov is wearing a Party cadre's tunic, buttoned to the neck, and he once again stares purposefully from the frame. There is more than a hint of cruelty in his down-turned mouth. He is every inch the ruthless Party man. The formality of the pose and the fact that Bibikov was born in an age before one felt entirely unselfconscious in front of a camera mean that the mask is near perfect. There is no hint of the man in either picture, only of the man he wanted to be.
He died a man without a past. Like many of his age and class, Bibikov shed his former self like a shameful skin, to be reborn as a Homo Sovieticus, a new Soviet man. He reinvented himself so effectively that even the NKVD investigators who painstakingly chronicled his passage through the NKVD's 'meat grinder' in the summer and autumn of 1937 were able to unearth only the merest trace of his former existence. There were no photos, no papers, no records of his life before the Party.
His family were descended from one of Catherine the Great's generals, Alexander Bibikov, who earned the Empress's favour and a noble title by putting down a peasant uprising led by Emeliyan Pugachev in 1773. The revolt was crushed with great brutality, just as the Empress ordered; summary hangings and beatings were meted out to thousands of rebels who had dared to defy the state.
Boris Bibikov was born in the Crimea in 1903 or 1904 - his NKVD file says the former, his mother writes the latter. His father Lev, a small landowner, died when Boris and his two brothers, Yakov and Isaac, were very young. Bibikov never talked about him. Their mother, Sofia, was a Jewess from a well-to-do Crimean merchant family whose father Naum owned a flour mill and a grain elevator, which could account for the odd 'profession' Bibikov listed on his arrest form, 'mill worker'. Boris knew English, he did not fight in the Civil War. That is just about all we know of his early life. Yakov, the only one of the Bibikov brothers to survive past the Second World War, who lived until 1979, was similarly obsessive - he never mentioned his background, or his executed brother. For the Bibikov brothers there was only the future, no looking back.
I don't believe that my grandfather was a hero, but he lived in heroic times, and such times brought out an impulse to greatness in people large and small. The slogans of the Bolshevik Revolution were Peace, Land and Bread; and at the time this message must, to ambitious and idealistic men, have seemed fresh, vibrant and couched in the language of prophesy. The Party's cadres were to be nothing less than the avant-garde of world history. At some point soon after the October Revolution swept away the old Russia Bibikov seems, like many members of the 'former classes', to have had some sort of romantic epiphany. Or perhaps - who now knows - it was an impulse of ambition, vanity or greed. His inheritance, his maternal grandfather's minor Crimean flour-milling empire, was nationalized in 1918. Many of his grander relatives in Moscow and Petrograd had fled into exile or been arrested as class enemies. The Bolsheviks were Russia's new masters, and the route to advancement for an energetic and intelligent young man was to join the winning side, as quickly as possible.
But the only witness we have left is Lenina, and her testimony is that her father was a high-minded and selfless man. And even if that wasn't the case, Lenina's word has a kind of emotional truth of its own. So let us say that a new world was being built, and Boris's imagination was caught by the grandeur of the vision, fresh, new and beautiful, and so he and his two younger brothers, Yakov and Isaac, threw themselves wholeheartedly into it.
During the last year of the Civil War Boris enrolled in the newly opened Higher Party School in the Crimean port of Simferopol. The school was designed to train a new generation of commissars to rule the great empire which the Bolsheviks had recently won, much to their own surprise. After a year's training in theoretical Marxist-Leninism and the rudiments of agitation and propaganda, my grandfather was inducted into the Party in May 1924, a young firebrand of twenty-one, ready to serve the Revolution wherever it needed him.
As it turned out, the Revolution's most pressing immediate need was a prosaic one. Boris was sent to supervise the summer tomato and aubergine harvest at a fledgling collective farm in Kurman Kimilchi, a former Tatar settlement populated for two centuries by ethnic Germans, in the highlands of the Crimean peninsula. It was there, in the dusty summer fields, that he met his future wife, Martha Platonovna Shcherbak.
A few weeks before she met Boris, Martha Shcherbak had left her younger sister Anna to die on a train platform in Simferopol.
The two girls were on their way from their native village near Poltava, in the western Ukraine, to look for summer work on the farms of the Crimea. Martha, already twenty-three years old, was well past the age when peasant girls of her generation were expected to marry. They came from a family of eleven sisters; two brothers had died in infancy. There is little doubt that her father, Platon, considered having so many daughters nothing less than a curse and seems to have been only too glad to get rid of two of them.
Martha grew up amid the brooding suspicion and casual brutality of a dirt-poor village on the Ukrainian steppes. But even by the hard standards of Russian peasant life, her siblings found Martha quarrelsome, jealous and difficult. That may explain why she had failed to find a husband in her village, and why she and Anna were the two sisters deemed surplus to requirements and sent away to fend for themselves. Her father's rejection was the first, and perhaps deepest, of the many scars on her mind which were to develop into a deep, vicious streak.
By the time Anna and Martha reached Simferopol they had been living rough for at least a week, travelling on local trains and catching lifts on produce trucks. Anna had developed a fever, and in the crowds thronging the sweltering railway platform she fell into a dead faint. People gathered around the girl, who was turning blue and shivering. Someone shouted 'Typhus!' and panic spread. Martha stepped away from her sister, and turned to flee with the rest.
Martha was young, frightened, and alone for the first time after a life in the oppressive intimacy of the family's wooden farmhouse. Her fear of being quarantined in one of the notorious and deadly local typhus hospitals was perhaps rational enough. But her decision to abandon her sister was to haunt her for the rest of her life, an original sin for which she was cruelly punished. Driven by fear, no doubt, and confusion, Martha disclaimed all knowledge of the feverish teenager sprawled on the platform. She joined the crowd piling on to the first westbound train.
Many years later, after both mother and daughter had been through half a lifetime of horrors, Martha told her daughter Lenina the story of her sister's presumed death. But Martha mentioned the incident casually, pretending that it was perfectly normal. Something was broken inside her, or perhaps it had never been there.
Even as a small child, I feared my grandmother Martha. When she came to visit us in 1976 it was the first and only time she left the Soviet Union, and her first flight in an aeroplane. Before her trip to England, the longest journey she had made was as a Gulag prisoner in a train to Kazakhstan, and again on her way back. In the heavy suitcases she brought to London she had packed her own set of thick cotton bed sheets, as was the custom for Soviet travellers.
When Martha moved her limbs seemed impossibly cumbersome, as though her body were a burden to her. She wore the cheapest possible Soviet print dresses and heavy carpet slippers at home; when she went out she would put on a musty tweed twinset. She almost never smiled. At the family dinner table she would sit grim and impassive, as though disapproving of the bourgeois luxury in which her daughter lived. Once, when I pretended that my knife and fork were drumsticks, Martha scolded me with a sudden anger which made my eyes prick with tears. I wasn't sorry when she left. She dissolved into passionate tears as she said goodbye, which embarrassed me. 'I'll never see you again,' she said to my mother, and she was right. There was no time to say much more, as my father was waiting outside in his orange Volkswagen Beetle to take her to Heathrow.
I often think of Martha now, trying to strip away the layers of hearsay and adult knowledge which have grown around her image in my mind, to recall my own memories of her. I try to imagine the pretty, buxom girl that Boris Bibikov married. I wonder how she could have had a daughter as vivacious and full of positive energy as my own mother. After unravelling some of the story of Martha's broken life, I see that some twist in her soul turned all her energy and life force in on itself. She hated the world, and having been deprived of happiness, she tried to destroy it in everyone around her. I was a small child when I knew her. But even then, I sensed in the deadness of her eyes, the woodenness of her embrace, something eerie, and damaged.
