The Victims Return

Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin

Stephen F. Cohen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857730626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia rusa

Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called 'the other Holocaust'. During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of torture prisons and forced-labour camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953. This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned author and historian Stephen F. Cohen, who came to know many former Gulag inmates during his frequent trips to Moscow over a period of thirty years. Based on first-hand interviews with the victims themselves and on newly available materials, Cohen provides a powerful narrative of the survivors' post-Gulag saga, from their liberation and return to Soviet society, to their long struggle to salvage what remained of their shattered lives and to obtain justice. Spanning more than fifty years, "The Victims Return" combines individual stories with the fierce political conflicts that raged, both in society and in the Kremlin, over the victims of the terror and the people who had victimized them.
This compelling book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history.

CHAPTER 1

The History of A Book

Every era gives rise to its own specific types of sources.

—Vladlen Loginov (Russian historian)

I advise you to stop spending time with people who have grievances against the Soviet government.

—A KGB officer to this author, 1981

Influenced by centuries of repression and censorship, Russian writers often say that manuscripts, like people, have their own histories. Certainly, it is true of this book. I drafted a summary of the project almost thirty years ago, in 1983. Until recently, it remained, along with the large amount of materials I had collected, in my files. But the subject never ceased to be an important part of my long professional and personal relationship with Russia, as readers will soon understand.

The project was intended to be, as much of it still is, the story of survivors of Stalin’s Gulag who returned to Soviet society under his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in the years from 1953 to 1964. I did the original research in Moscow in the repressive late 1970s and early 1980s, when public discussion of Stalin’s terror and its victims was officially banned and often punished inside the Soviet Union. No sensible scholar—I was a professor at Princeton University—normally would have chosen a subject for which so little information was readily available. But, I came to think, the subject chose me.

It began even earlier, though only as an afterthought. In 1965, I was walking in a London park with the writer Robert Conquest while discussing his new undertaking, which became the famous and indispensable book, The Great Terror. Conquest, who had recently befriended me, was already an eminent Anglo-American man-of-letters—a poet, novelist, literary critic, and political historian. I, more than twenty years younger, had no writerly achievements at all, only the beginnings of a Ph.D. dissertation on Nikolai Bukharin, a Soviet founding leader put on trial and executed by Stalin in 1938 as an “enemy of the people.”

Because my work on Bukharin, who was remembered at that time mainly as the model for Arthur Koestler’s famous novel about the Moscow Show Trials, Darkness at Noon, eventually led to this book, I should explain why I chose him as a subject. It was not due, as some people later thought, to any family ties to the Soviet experience. (I grew up remote from all of that, in Kentucky.) Instead, my graduate studies suggested that Bukharin’s ideas, not Leon Trotsky’s, as was generally believed, had been the real Soviet alternative to Stalinism. I had in mind the market-related, evolutionary New Economic Policy, or NEP, introduced by Lenin in 1921 and elaborated on and defended by Bukharin after Lenin’s death in 1924. His ouster from the leadership by Stalin in 1929 led to the brutal collectivization of the peasantry and thus, I thought, to the terror.

Little more than that reinterpretation of the NEP 1920s was on my mind in 1965. But listening to Conquest discuss new materials he had found on the 1930s, I remarked, as an aside, that I had learned Bukharin’s widow, Anna Larina, and their son, Yuri Larin, had somehow survived Stalin’s terror and were alive somewhere in Moscow. Twenty-six years younger than her husband, Anna had endured more than two decades in prisons, labor camps, and Siberian exile, while Yuri, separated from his mother at barely a year old, had grown up in an orphanage without knowing his parents’ identity. (Larina later told their story in her memoirs, This I Cannot Forget.)¹ Yes, Conquest replied, no doubt there were still millions of such survivors all over the Soviet Union. We wondered, very briefly, what their lives had been like after the Gulag.

The seed was planted, but it grew only later. In 1976, I began living in Moscow for extended periods, usually on a U.S.-Soviet academic exchange program. By then, my book about Bukharin had been published in New York and a smuggled copy had made its way to Anna Larina and Yuri, who welcomed me into their family.² Indeed, much of my Moscow social life was shaped by the extended Bukharin family, which included Anna’s two other children, Nadezhda and Mikhail, born in Siberian exile, with her second husband, Fyodor Fadeyev, whom she met in the Gulag and who died shortly after their return to Moscow in 1959.

I soon realized that most of the people I came to know through the Bukharin family were also survivors of Stalin’s terror or relatives of his other victims. Public knowledge of their terrible ordeal had been heavily censored since shortly after Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1964, and they had little hope, if any, of ever making it widely known. For that reason, and because of my “adopted-son” relationship with Anna Larina, the ranking old Bolshevik widow in those martyred circles, they were eager to tell me their stories and give me unpublished memoirs. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I found myself dwelling in a subterranean history, a kind of living archaeological find, known only fragmentarily in the Soviet Union and almost not at all in the West. Writing that history, it seemed, had fallen to me.

The book I originally planned had two purposes. Using what I had learned from doing a biography of Bukharin, I wanted to write a collective biography of Gulag returnees, beginning with their liberation in the 1950s and ending with their efforts to rejoin society and salvage what remained of their lives. The second purpose reflected my interest in reform in the Soviet system. Repressed historical traditions, as the NEP 1920s and Bukharin’s ideas then were, had often led elsewhere to major political changes. Even in the ultra-conservative Soviet 1970s, I thought it was also likely to happen, at least eventually, in Moscow. In that connection, I wanted to examine how the return of millions of Gulag zeks after Stalin’s death had affected policymaking and the system itself under Khrushchev.

This second purpose was outside the mainstream of Western studies. Still adhering to the “totalitarianism” model, most studies treated the Soviet political system as something apart from both its history and society, largely unaffected by either and thus essentially unreformable.³ The impact of Gulag returnees in the 1950s and 1960s seemed to suggest otherwise. Their fates were a central factor in the intensely historicized politics of the period, when controversies over the past became an inescapable aspect of current struggles over power and policy at the top. At the same time, the personal needs of so many freed prisoners and their families created both a social constituency below for further de-Stalinization from above and a test of the system’s capacity for change. (Before it became widespread in Western Soviet studies, I was trying to fuse social and political history.)

But where could I obtain the information needed for such a highly empirical work? Almost no secondary literature existed on the subject; the best Western books about the terror, notably Conquest’s, focused on people’s victimization, not their subsequent experiences.⁴ And in a country of encompassing censorship, closed archives, still-intimidated victims, and a hostile state, there was, not surprisingly, only one fragmentary study of returnees written by a Soviet author—the brief account of several post-Gulag lives at the end of the third volume of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic work, The Gulag Archipelago, which appeared in the West in the 1970s.⁵

This meant I had to rely mainly on primary or first-hand accounts. Memoirs would have been ideal, but there were scarcely any. A number of uncensored Gulag memoirs had been published abroad over the years but were of limited value for my purpose. Most covered the period before Stalin’s death or said almost nothing about life after the Gulag. And some were written by repatriated foreign prisoners, including a few Americans who had gone to the Soviet Union in the 1930s in search of work or the promised land, whose experiences were not sufficiently representative of Soviet ones.⁶

There were only two exceptions. One was Solzhenitsyn’s own idiosyncratic memoir, issued in English as The Oak and The Calf, which dealt largely with his struggle, before being deported in 1974, to publish his writings in the Soviet Union, not his personal life. More valuable were the two-volume memoirs of the former Communist teacher Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind, which remain essential reading on the Stalinist terror years. (In 2009, parts of them were made into a British theatrical film.) In particular, Ginzburg’s second volume recounts her life after being released from camp in the late 1940s, including her forced residence in Magadan, where she tutored children of NKVD officers and where her own young son was able to rejoin her.

There were, however, two other sources of written information, both of them Soviet, little known, and important. One included revelations about the terror published in the Soviet Union during the somewhat relaxed censorship of Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” as his de-Stalinizing policies became known. The widespread impression, even among specialists, that few such writings were actually permitted even at that time—in literature, for example, only Solzhenitsyn’s famous short novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—or that they were unworthy of attention because they were pro-Soviet, is mistaken. (Varlam Shalamov, regarded by some as the greatest Gulag writer, refused to be so dismissive of those more conformist authors.)⁷

In the early and mid-1960s, many informative commentaries on Stalin’s terror, including memoir accounts by Gulag survivors, appeared in officially sanctioned Soviet publications, some thinly disguised as fiction. This was the case not only in Moscow and Leningrad, but in less cosmopolitan cities as well. Prompted by returnees who advised me in various ways, I found valuable information in literary-political journals edited and published in remote regions where there had been large concentrations of camp inmates and exiles, and where many had remained after their release, particularly in Siberia and Kazakhstan. Getting access to those journals was difficult, but well worth the effort.⁸

The other written Soviet source of information was entirely uncensored: a growing volume of typescript materials circulated by hand and known as samizdat, or “self-published.” Those expressions of unofficial glasnost—a word later adopted by Mikhail Gorbachev to denote his policy of ending censorship—produced an array of writings ranging from histories, memoirs, and fiction to contemporary political and social commentary.⁹ Not surprisingly, terror-era subjects and survivor-authors themselves were a major component of this new and essential literature.

Most of all, though, I relied on the personal testimonies of Stalin’s victims whom I came to know. In the beginning, I met them through the Bukharin family, but soon also through three other exceptional Muscovites. Two were well-known dissident historians, as well as terror victims, with whom I developed close personal and professional relations over the years, Roy Medvedev and Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko.¹⁰

Then in his early fifties, Roy, whose father, an army officer and Communist professor of philosophy, had perished in the Gulag, was a unique figure in dissident circles, not only because he combined Marxist-Leninist views with pro-democracy ones. An academic by education and political loner by nature, his greatest achievement at the time was the first authentic history of Stalinism ever written inside the Soviet Union, Let History Judge, though publishable only abroad. It remains a powerful indictment and indispensable source of information.

Unlike many dissidents, Roy, who had joined the Communist Party after his father’s exoneration in 1956 and had been expelled in 1969, was coolly analytical and valued facts over polemics, rarely expressing disagreement in more than a bemused smile. Tall, handsome, and slightly stooped, he had the silver-haired appearance of a British don, enhanced by clothes from his twin brother, Zhores, a scientist living in exile in London due to his own protest activities. Roy and I became friends, but our frequent discussions were usually those of academic colleagues. He had knowledge I needed about historical events, people, and materials; I knew the Western literature that he did not. It was, we agreed, an excellent collaboration.¹¹

Anton was also a loner with historical interests similar to Roy’s, but otherwise the two men were very different. Both of Anton’s parents, including his father, the legendary Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, who had led the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd in 1917, had died in Stalin’s prisons. Like many grown children of Stalin’s leading victims, Anton had himself “sat” in the Gulag for almost thirteen years, an experience that shaped almost everything he did later, from his prosecutorial writings and the risks he took to his several marriages and choice of friends.

Nearly blind, but wiry and determined, Anton was capable of boundless research and writing (as well as an astonishing number of chin-ups, even two decades later, in his eighties). Like another former zek, Solzhenitsyn, he was embattled, willful, and overly confident in his Gulag-acquired cunning. As our friendship developed, his frequent requests for my assistance in exposing “Stalinist hangmen,” past and present, sometimes worried me. But Anton, like Roy, was admired and trusted by many Gulag survivors, and he too persuaded them to help me.

My third enabler was Tatyana Bayeva, a remarkable woman in her thirties at the center of Moscow’s beleaguered human rights movement. (A famous “Demonstration of Seven on Red Square” protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 actually included an eighth person—the twenty-one-year-old Tanya Bayeva. She was arrested, but, unlike the others, not punished, except for being expelled from her academic institute.) The movement’s ranks also included survivors of Stalin’s terror as well as many children of victims who did not return. Indeed, Tanya’s father, Aleksandr Bayev, a much-honored, internationally known biochemist and high official in the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the 1970s, had spent seventeen years in Stalinist camps and exile, where she was born.¹² Living in the same Moscow building, Tanya and I became close friends as the result of a neighborly encounter.

Though overlooked in most accounts, women formed the infrastructure of the Soviet dissident movement from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. They typed the samizdat, organized its distribution, arranged havens for materials and people on the move, and tried to keep the men from drinking too much. Few were more committed or important than Tanya Bayeva. Her small apartment, laden with manuscripts and forbidden books published abroad, was a regular meeting place for human rights activists and other dissidents. Among them were middle-aged survivors of the terror, especially men smitten with Tanya’s exotic looks, worldly manner, and aura of a keeper of many secrets. Several of these people also became valuable sources of information for me.

By the early 1980s, due mostly to Anna Larina, Roy, Anton, and Tanya, I had come to know more than twenty Gulag survivors or other terror victims. During periodic stays in Moscow, I interviewed them at various lengths, a few repeatedly, alone or at small private gatherings, but always in strict confidence, as the times required. Each had returned from his or her own Golgotha, a word they often used. Many of their names would be familiar to Russian readers, but not to American ones. Nonetheless, I feel obliged to mention some of them here both to acknowledge their help and to give readers a sense of who they were.

Most of those in middle age when I met them had been arrested or otherwise punished as children of prominent Stalin victims with political ties to Bukharin. Yuri Aikhenvald and Leonid Petrovsky were sons of well-known young Bukharinists of the 1920s. Natalya Rykova’s father, Aleksei Rykov, was Lenin’s successor as Soviet premier and Bukharin’s erstwhile ally in the leadership; the writer Kamil Ikramov’s father headed the Soviet Uzbek Communist Party. Both men were tried and executed with Bukharin in 1938. Igor Pyatnitsky’s father, Osip, a high-ranking member of the Party’s Central Committee, tried to stop Stalin’s terror in 1937 and save Bukharin and the oth...