In one of his most influential works, Don Quixote on Russian Soil, Aikhenvald tells a story about the close friend of his family by the name of Lyalya Breitman, whose family suffered terribly during the purges of the 1930s. One of Breitman’s brothers died in the Russian Civil War after the Revolution and the other was already under arrest when in 1937 her husband, who had once held a very high position in the People’s Commissariat of Finances, was arrested too. By the autumn of that year Lyalya was living with her aged mother, two of her young children, the two-year-old daughter of her sister who was a victim of the repressions and the four-year-old daughter of another sister who was in jail. One day Lyalya was visited by two young men from the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the KGB). They were, Aikhenvald writes, ‘polite, with nicely combed hair and with “Ready for Work and Defense” badges on their jackets’. The polite young men took Lyalya’s passport away and replaced it with tickets for the whole family on a train to Astrakhan. The train was to leave the following morning; the family had less than twenty-four hours to pack before their exile. The young men from NKVD warned Lyalya that if the family was not ready to go, they would be put on the train forcefully and without any luggage.
At this time, Aikhenvald writes:
The two-year-old Nastya was on her tippy-toes trying to get the big kettle with the boiling water from the top of the wardrobe; the four-year-old Bellochka was weeping loudly because the younger of Lyalya’s sons was refusing to play dolls with her, while the older son was helping the grandma pack in fabric shopping bags multiple volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia with their bright red, golden-lettered spines – the family had nothing to live on, and this magnificent edition was being taken to the second-hand book dealers.
The details of that day Lyalya Breitman remembered for as long as she lived, as you would remember ‘the details of a nightmare that has tortured the person to such an extent that he could no longer wake up from it no matter how hard he tries’. Miraculously, the Breitman family managed to beg a favour from the wife of an old acquaintance of the family, Nikolai Yezhov, once a simple guy with eczema and a weakness for the poems of Esenin, but by 1934 head of the NKVD. He would give his surname to this darker than dark period, which would come to be known as the Yezhovzhina. But in this case, utterly uncharacteristically, perhaps for a moment ‘softened’ by his wife’s tearful pleas on behalf of Lyalya, he spared the accused, allowing Lyalya Breitman’s family to avoid exile.
The scene that Aikhenvald paints was replicated in countless households, minus the miraculous ending. The Soviet century was the century of mass relocations, deportations and exile. Whole peoples were uprooted and families were systematically torn apart. ‘What could people take in memory of their past?’ writes historian Irina Sherbakova:
What could they save and keep, these special deportees, Gulag prisoners, evacuees, and those who were bombed or forcefully taken to Germany? What could they take except their photographs and documents that survived by miracle? What family relics are kept in millions of Russian families that had ‘24 hours to pack’ and were shipped to Siberia, what valuables? A Zinger sewing machine, a copper mortar…
In her Moscow apartment Marina Gustavovna takes me and Billie to one of the glassed shelves and points to the little doll sitting on it. ‘This is my mother’s doll,’ she says. ‘It was headless for a while, but we have found the head, sewn it back on, got the doll sorted out. I made a dress for her myself.’ I cannot hide my disbelief. In the course of the twentieth century, family as an idea, an institution, a dominant form of human sociality, was to be made completely subservient to the State if not, for all intents and purposes, redundant. The heirlooms of individual family traditions, the objects and stories passed from generation to generation, were meant to be replaced by the uniform mythology in which Stalin, or Lenin, was the patriarch presiding over a large family of Soviet people. Yet this doll, which physically connects five generations in the Shpet family, from Marina Gustavovna’s mother to her great-grandchildren, tells a different story. And in this story familial ties not only survive but also prevail over all kinds of pseudo-communities meant to eventually eliminate them – from the collective farm to the ubiquitous Nation itself.
As I speak to Marina Gustavovna and Valeriya Mikhaylovna in October 2008, all across Russia, State and regional archives are closing their doors to independent historians. Access to invaluable archival documents is disappearing in front of researchers’ very eyes. School textbooks are being rewritten. Independent historical organisations such as the Memorial society are raided, kept under constant surveillance and repeatedly threatened. Historians are beginning to be arrested (first were journalists, now it is historians’ turn, then writers, right?). There is no question of the current government’s apparent determination to rehabilitate the Soviet regime by all means necessary. Yet again history is asked to service the ideological needs of the State. (’We can do it the easy way or the hard way.’) And, all the while, the clock of historical truth is ticking madly as the last of the eyewitnesses of Gulags and Stalinism die of old age, one by one.
As I speak to Marina Gustavovna and Valeriya Mikhaylovna, the government-owned television network Russia Channel television broadcasts the final shortlist from a nationwide search for the historical figure who best represents the Russia of today. This program, Name of Russia, conducted under the auspices of the Russian Academy of Sciences (no less!) and modelled on BBC-TV’s 100 Greatest Britons, started out with five hundred potential candidates. Now I watch the announcement of the final twelve with growing astonishment. Two literary giants (Pushkin and Dostoyevsky), one medieval leader (Nevsky), one nineteenth-century general (Suvorov), one lonely scientific maverick (Mendeleev, of periodic table fame), four Russian monarchs (Peter the Great, Elizabeth II – the only woman, Ivan the Terrible and Alexander II), one pre-revolutionary statesman (Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911) and, among this not-too-alarming populist mishmash, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.