Stalin's Children (7 page)

Until 1937 the Ukraine was a relative sanctuary from the show trials that were decimating the Moscow-based élite of the army, intelligentsia and government. But it was the Ukraine, perceived by Stalin to be a den of Trotskyism and potential opposition, which was to feel the full brunt of his wrath when he finally unleashed the might of the security machine he had so carefully constructed.

At the February-March 1937 plenum of top Party members, Stalin's opponents made a last, doomed stand, protesting against Stalin's monopoly of power. Immediately after the meeting a fifth of the Ukrainian Party leadership were expelled. Bibikov, reading the curt announcement in
Pravda,
must have feared that worse was to come. By early summer close colleagues began to be summoned for questioning by the NKVD. Few returned.

People instinctively drew into themselves, huddling into self-protective silence like pedestrians hurrying home during a summer rainstorm. Lenina noticed a sudden change in atmosphere. Her father was looking tired and had lost much of his usual jollity. The friendly gossip of the Party wives on the stairwell had become nervous pleasantries. It must have been with relief that Bibikov prepared for his summer trip to a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Georgian Black Sea coast, in July 1937.

I opened the brown cardboard cover of my grandfather's NKVD file, now disintegrating with age, on a grey December morning in a gloomy office in the former NKVD building in Kiev, now the headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service. By now bloated to 260 pages, the file existed on that peculiarly Russian border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty (confiscation of Komsomol card, confiscation of a Browning automatic and twenty-three rounds of ammunition, confiscation of Lenina's Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher) and the starkly shocking: long confessions, written in microscopic, crabbed writing, covered in blotches and apparently written under torture, the formal accusation signed by Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, the slip with its scribbled signature verifying that the sentence of death had been carried out. Papers, forms, notes, receipts all the paraphernalia of a nightmarish, self-devouring bureaucracy. A stack of paper that equalled one human life.

The first document, as fatal as any which followed, was a typed resolution by the Chernigov Regional Prosecutor sanctioning the arrest of 'Boris L- Bibikov, Head of Department of Management of Party Organs of the Chernigov Region' for suspected involvement in a 'counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization and organized anti-Soviet activity'. It recommends that Bibikov be held in custody without bail for the duration of the investigation. His middle name is left blank, as though the name was copied from a list by somebody who did not know Bibikov or anything about his case. The civilian prosecutor's resolution was backed up the same day by an NKVD authorization of arrest, which, as the convoluted bureaucracy gathered momentum, became by 22 July a formal arrest warrant issued by the local prosecutor. Officer Koshichursin - or something like it, the name is written in barely legible, semi-literate handwriting - was charged with finding Bibikov 'in the town of Chernigov'. He failed Bibikov was already on his way to Gagry. They finally caught up with him there on 27 July, and brought him back to Chernigov's NKVD jail.

What he thought at that moment when he passed over to the other side of the looking glass, from the world of the living to that of the condemned, what he said, no one will now know. It would have been easiest for him if he'd said nothing, and resignedly submitted, considering himself already a dead man. But that wasn't his character. He was a fighter, and he fought for his life, pitifully unaware that his death had already been ordained by the Party. As a Party man he should have known there was no way to resist its almighty will - though we know that at some point in the months that followed, he ceased to be the apparatchik and became just a man, refusing to live by lies for a few brief moments of misguided bravery.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in
The Gulag Archipelago
of the loneliness of the accused at his arrest, the confusion and dislocation, the fear and indignation of the men and women who were rapidly filling the Soviet Union's jails to bursting point that summer. 'The whole apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and uninhibited will,' writes Solzhenitsyn. 'Brother mine! Do not condemn those who turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have. Do not be the first to cast a stone at them.'

Yevgeniya Ginzburg's harrowing account of her own arrest and eighteen-year imprisonment during the Purge,
Into the Whirlwind,
describes the infamous NKVD 'conveyor'. Prisoners would be continually interrogated by teams of investigators, deprived of food and sleep, harangued, beaten and humiliated until they signed or wrote their confessions. The ones who broke down first were confronted with those more resilient, in order to break their solidarity. They were told that resistance was useless; once one made a confession the rest could be shot on that basis alone. Their wives and children were threatened. Perversely, committed Communists could be persuaded to sign for the sake of the Revolution - your Party demands it! Are you defying your Party? Stool pigeons urged fellow prisoners to confess - it's the only way to save your life, your family's lives! Solzhenitsyn recounts how convinced Communists would whisper to their fellows, 'It's our duty to support Soviet interrogation. It's a combat situation. We ourselves are to blame. We were too softhearted; now look at the rot which has multiplied. There is a vicious secret war going on. Even here we are surrounded by enemies.'

Lied to, tortured, living in a world of pain and confusion, Bibikov the Party man for once refused to obey the Party's orders and clung on to his innocence for as long as he could bear. But, like almost all of them, he broke in the end.

Nineteen days after his arrest he signed his first confession. It was a surprisingly long time to have held out. But nevertheless Bibikov confessed abjectly, in writing, to crimes against the Soviet Union. To the sabotage of the factory he helped to build. To the recruitment of Trotskyite agents. To propaganda against the state. He admitted that he had betrayed the Party to which he had devoted his life. His closest colleagues implicated him, and he, in turn, implicated them. None of the twenty-five supposed members of his circle refused to confess.

The first confession is dated 14 August 1937. It is the first time Bibikov speaks in the file - the first hint of a human voice among the dry officialese. The crimes to which he confesses are so bizarre, so startlingly improbable, that I felt physically nauseous at the lurch from banal legalisms into the grotesque language of nightmare.

'Transcript of Interrogation. Accused Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, born 1903. Former Party member. Question: In the statement you have made today in your own hand you admit your participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization. By whom, when and under what circumstances were you inducted into this organization?

'Answer: I was recruited into the counter-revolutionary terrorist organization by the former second Party Secretary of Kharkov, ILYIN, in February 1934 . . . We met often in the course of our Party work. During our meetings in 1934 I expressed my doubts about the correctness of Party policy towards agriculture, workers' pay and so on. In February 1934, after a committee meeting, ILYIN invited me into his study and said he wanted to talk frankly. That is when he proposed that I become a member of the Trotskyite organization.'

The transcript was typed, and Bibikov signed at the bottom. The writing holds no clue as to what was going through his mind as he scribbled his signature.

But one simple confession was not enough. The bureaucracy demanded more detail, more names to fulfil the quota of enemies of the people to be found in every district and region in the country. Like scriptwriters concocting a soap opera of grotesque complexity, the investigators required their vast cast to corroborate each others' stories, to add new layers to the plot. Bibikov's first confession brought no respite. The interrogations continued. But at some point something within him must have rebelled at the perversity and the horror, and he tried to claw his way back into the world of the sane. Those moments of defiance ring through the thin, laconic pages of the file like a silent shout.

'Question to Fedayev,' reads the stark text of the transcript of his first 'confrontation' with a fellow 'conspirator', the former head of the Kharkov Regional Committee. 'Tell us what you know about Bibikov.'

'Fedayev's reply: " . . . In the course of two conversations with Bibikov I confirmed that he was ready to take part in the organization of Trotskyite work. In our last conversation we agreed to set up a Trotskyite group at the KhTZ . . . "

'Question to Bibikov: "Do you confirm the suspect Fedayev's statement?"

'Bibikov's reply: "No. That is a lie. We never had such a conversation.',

'This statement has been read to us and is accurate. (Signed) Fedayev. The accused Bibikov refused to sign.'

But in the end his defiance was useless, witnessed only by NKVD Lieutenants Slavin and Chalkov, who conducted the confrontation, and Fedayev himself, who was probably too terrified to think Bibikov's stand was anything other than masochistic stupidity. Bibikov eventually broke completely.

'At the Kharkov Tractor Factory we decided to sabotage an expensive, complicated machine which was crucial to the production of wheeled tractors . . .' he wrote in blotted, tiny writing in his third and last detailed confession. 'We persuaded engineer KOZLOV to leave a tool in the machine so that it would be broken for a long period. The machine alone cost 40,000 in gold and is one of only two in the whole country . . . At the KhTZ we plotted to throw an artillery round from the war into a blast furnace to put it out of action for two or three months . . . I also recruited my own deputy, Ivan KAVITSKY, into our organization . . . We attempted to undermine the work of the KhTZ by delaying the fulfilment of orders for the Hammer and Sickle Tractor station, and delayed the payment of wages to the workers.'

In the margin are inexplicable notes in his own writing, apparently written under dictation, saying, 'Who, What, When?', 'More precise', 'Which organization?'

'Our evil counter-revolutionary act was averted only by the vigilance of senior engineer GINZBURG,' the last confession concludes. 'This is how I betrayed my Party. Bibikov.'

The manuscript had been carefully torn across halfway down the page. Above the tear are signs of some kind of scribble, as though the writer had tried, in despair, to erase the death sentence he had just written for himself.

Then his voice disappears. There are excerpts from the transcripts of other accused in which Bibikov's name is mentioned - sixteen interlinking confessions, all meticulously typed with angry, almost punched-through commas between the capitalized names, 'ZELENSKY, BUTSENKO, SAPOV, BRANDT, GENKIN, BIBIKOV . . .'

He was brought to trial before a closed session of the Military Collegium in Kiev on 13 October 1937, the so-called
troika
courts of three judges who heard
in camera
the cases of those accused under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which covered 'any act designed to overthrow, undermine or weaken the authority of the workers' and peasants' Soviets'. The court's conclusion is long and detailed, mostly repeating word for word the accounts of acts of sabotage included in the confessions. But for good measure, the final draft upped the charges and concluded that 'Bibikov was a member of the
k.r.
[the term
kontrarevolustionnaya
is used so often that the typist begins to abbreviate it] Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist organization which carried out the wicked assassination of Comrade Kirov on 1 December 1934 and in following years planned and carried out terrorist acts against other Party and government leaders . . . We sentence the accused to the highest form of criminal punishment: to be shot and his property confiscated. Signed, A.M. ORLOV, S.N. ZHDANA, F.A. BATNER.'

Bibikov signed a form confirming that he had read the court's ruling and sentence. They were the last recorded words he wrote. Signing off, with bureaucratic neatness, on the file which contained the state's version of his life's story. It was the final act of a life devoted to serving the Party.

The last form of the seventy-nine pages in the so-called 'living' file, the flimsiest of all, was a mimeographed quartersheet strip of paper roughly cut off at the bottom with scissors, which confirms that the sentence of the court has been carried out. There is no hint of where or how, though the usual method was 'nine grams', the weight of a pistol round, to the back of the head. The signature of the commanding officer is illegible; the date is 14 October 1937.

For the two days that I sat in Kiev exarrurung the file, Alexander Panamaryev, a young officer of the Ukrainian Security Service, sat with me, reading out passages of barely legible cursive script and explaining legal terms. He was pale and intelligent, about my age, the kind of quiet young man who looked as though he lived with his mother. He seemed, underneath an affected professional brusqueness, almost as moved as I was by what we read.

'Those were terrible times,' he said quietly as we took a cigarette break in the gathering dusk of Volodimirskaya Street, the granite bulk of the old NKVD building looming above us. 'Your grandfather believed, but do you not think that his accusers believed also? Or the men who shot him? He knew that people had been shot before he was arrested, but did he speak out? How do we know what we would have done in that situation? May God forbid that we ever face the same test.'

Solzhenitsyn once posed the same, terrible question. 'If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? If only it was so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?'