Granta 166, page 14
Arosev, Gera and the children were on vacation when the knock came. To everyone’s surprise, they came for Gera. Arosev kept trying to reach Molotov, but whoever answered the phone would either hang up or breathe into the receiver without speaking. Arosev kept saying: ‘Viacha, I know it’s you, please say something, tell me what to do!’ Finally, after one of these calls, Molotov said: ‘See that the children are taken care of,’ and hung up. Arosev was shot in February 1938, two months after Gera.
Valentin Trifonov was arrested on 22 June 1937. His eleven-year-old son Yuri, who was reading The Count of Monte Cristo earlier that day, wrote in his diary: ‘I have no doubt that Dad will be released soon. Dad is the most honest person in the world. Today has been the worst day of my life.’
Most of the men were executed within weeks or months, although their children would not be informed for over two decades. Most of the women were sent to special camps for ‘family members of traitors to the motherland’, where they spent eight years (plus another ten or so in exile) before returning to their children’s new homes – old, sick, broken, unwanted, unloved, and utterly lost. Their youthful faith was gone – along with their husbands. They and their children had nothing to say to each other. Bolshevism, like most millenarian movements, proved a one-generation phenomenon.
But the Party and the state still had time left to live. The top offices left vacant by the Great Terror were taken over by those who were meant to lead the dictatorship of the proletariat but hadn’t until the mass arrests started – those former workers who were too young to have taken part in the revolution or Civil War but old enough to be promoted in the 1920s, admitted to colleges under class quotas during the Stalin Revolution, and hired as industrial managers in the mid-1930s. They identified with the Party that identified itself with them but were utterly uninterested in Marxist theory or ‘treasures of world literature’. They prided themselves on being modest, pragmatic, and uncharismatic. They inherited the jobs of their martyred Old Bolshevik sponsors without ever wishing or needing to acknowledge the fact. They kept talking about building socialism but seemed content to keep building factories. They were the children of the revolution in the sense of being its ultimate (in the sense of both ‘best’ and ‘last’) beneficiaries.
Within two years of the end of the Great Terror, Podgornyi advanced from deputy chief engineer to chief engineer to Deputy People’s Commissar (minister) of Food Industry of Ukraine to, by the time he turned thirty-six, Deputy People’s Commissar of Food Industry of the Soviet Union. At the same time Brezhnev moved – also through a series of quick steps over dead bodies – from college director to the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast propaganda secretary, and Kosygin, from factory director to People’s Commissar of Textile Industry of the Soviet Union. Most members of that cohort served as political officers or industrial managers during World War II, came into their own as leaders of postwar reconstruction, survived Khrushchev’s attempts to restore the spirit of their First Five-Year Plan youth (which they acknowledged as foundational but feared as a threat to their hard-earned respectability), and came to power in a coup d’état in 1964, Kosygin as Prime Minister (Chairman of the Council of Ministers) and Brezhnev as First (later ‘General’) Secretary. Both were fifty-eight years old. Podgornyi joined them a year later as President (Chairman of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers). For the next twenty years they presided over ‘really existing socialism’, or a revolutionary regime devoted to permanence.
The children of the actual revolutionaries were twenty years younger and worlds apart socially, culturally, and emotionally. Unlike the Brezhnev generation, which had taken after its Old Bolshevik sponsors in being publicly all-male, they consisted of boys and girls who would grow up to be distinct men and women. The Great Terror put an end to their happy childhood but not to their passionate identification with the country their fathers had built. Yuri Trifonov and his sister were raised by their Old Bolshevik grandmother; Arosev’s three daughters were raised by their mother. When the Great Patriotic War began, most boys chose to clear their fathers’ names by volunteering for the army. Many were killed – thus fulfilling their oath to Pushkin and following him into the temple of eternal youth. The rest graduated from prestigious colleges and rejoined the Soviet cultural and professional elite (known to both members and non-members as the ‘intelligentsia’). Yuri Trifonov became a celebrated writer and Stalin Prize winner; two of Arosev’s daughters became actresses (one of them, Olga, a movie and TV star), and one, a writer and translator from Czech. They followed the ascent of their proletarian older comrades in the newspapers and marveled at the miraculous rise of the new socialist factories; celebrated their happy childhood as part of a common proletarian victory, before and after their fathers’ inexplicable demise; and joined their fellow countrymen – workers, peasants, Party bosses, and urban intellectuals – during the war, in pursuit of ‘one victory, one for all, whatever the price’. The song with that refrain was written by the celebrated 1960s bard, Bulat Okudzhava, the son of Georgian and Armenian Old Bolsheviks born in 1924 in downtown Moscow. The generation of the 1930s ‘happy childhood’ had become the ‘war generation’.
But then the paths of the revolution’s two sets of heirs began to diverge. What came as a springtime of hope for the young war veterans from Old Bolshevik backgrounds appeared as ‘Khrushchev’s hare-brained schemes’ to the mature Party leaders. What was ‘loyalty to the ideals of Marxism–Leninism’ to the Brezhnev generation looked like a ‘Big Lie’ to the urban intelligentsia (the ‘war generation’ had become ‘the sixties generation’). What was known officially as ‘Party leadership’ seemed like usurpation to the more educated among the led. For Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb born in 1921, the moment of truth came in 1955, after a successful test of his ‘device’. According to Sakharov’s memoirs, the test was followed by a banquet at the residence of Marshal Nedelin, the commander of Soviet Strategic Missile Forces.
When we were all in place, the brandy was poured. The bodyguards stood along the wall. Nedelin nodded to me, inviting me to propose the first toast. Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: ‘May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.’ The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Nedelin grinned a bit crookedly. Then he rose, glass in hand, and said: ‘Let me tell a parable. An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. “Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.” His wife, who was lying on the stove, said: “Just pray to be hard, old man, I can guide it in myself.” Let’s drink to getting hard.’
My whole body tensed, and I think I turned pale – normally I blush … The point of the story (half lewd, half blasphemous, which added to its unpleasant effect) was clear enough. We, the inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible weapon in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control … The ideas and emotions kindled at that moment … completely altered my thinking.
In the 1960s and 70s, Sakharov’s thinking came to be shared by a growing number of inventors, scientists, engineers, and craftsmen working on much less explosive devices. Like its imperial predecessor, the Soviet intelligentsia had been created to serve the state but ended up serving its own ‘consciousness’ (split, in various proportions, between ‘progress’ and the ‘people’). The more desperately the aging state clung to its founding prophecy and the more intransigent it became in its instrumental approach to the educated elite, the more passionate that elite became in its opposition to the state and its attachment to (true) progress and (with ever growing reservations) the people. The children of the Old Bolsheviks began to think of their fathers as tragic heroes and of their fathers’ proletarian disciples as impostors. In theory – and often enough in practice to produce a sense of acute annoyance – the Party claimed the right to make all decisions about everything – from the Bomb to the Beatles. What added injury to insult was the growing sense that the ruling generation was not only politically illegitimate but socially inferior. The Soviet Union had started out as a dictatorship of the proletariat run by intellectuals; what it had become, in the eyes of the children of those intellectuals, was the dictatorship of the former proletarians who remained culturally proletarian (inarticulate, anti-intellectual, Russo-Ukrainian, domino-playing) in a country that had long since moved on. The Party bosses quietly admitted defeat by raising their own children to be professionals, not party bosses. By the 1980s, the rapidly growing anti-regime ‘intelligentsia’ led by the children of the Old Bolsheviks and their high-status contemporaries were watching with amused contempt as their former older comrades were dying slow deaths on national television, one after another, day after day. Kosygin died in December 1980, Brezhnev in November 1982, Podgornyi in January 1983. After a few more deaths in high office, there was no one left.
In 1963, Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, born in 1926, had written about her generation: ‘They are the best of the best … They are our future Decembrists, they are going to teach us all how to live. They are going to say their word yet – I am sure of that.’ They did. When Gorbachev walked onto the stage and proclaimed a new policy of glasnost (‘speaking up’), they were assembled in a chorus line, poised to give voice to a new millennium.
‘Decembrists’ were early-nineteenth-century aristocratic rebels who, according to Lenin, gave birth to the Russian revolutionary movement. The title of Lenin’s newspaper, Iskra (‘The Spark’), referred to a line from a poem by the Decembrist Alexander Odoevsky: ‘From a spark, a fire will flare up.’ The Old Bolsheviks started a fire in the expectation that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers, the proletariat. But history did not cooperate, and they had to do most of the gravedigging themselves. Having buried capitalism and anointed their proletarian successors, they moved into family apartments and, in due order and not entirely unselfconsciously, produced their own gravediggers by raising their children not as Bolshevik true believers but as members of the intelligentsia and would-be aristocrats (‘the best’ by virtue of both moral superiority and inherited privilege).
The Brezhnev generation inherited the state but not the flame. The state withered, and so did they; no one in the post-Communist world remembers their youth, celebrates their rise or claims them as ancestors. The modest rulers proved the greatest losers. A formerly proletarian state run by a few former proletarians turned out to be a dead end.
The Alliluyeva generation was kicked out of the Houses of Soviets but kept the flame burning – until the time came to torch their fathers’ inheritance. They never outgrew their youthful enthusiasms and never stopped discovering new books, people, and causes. Most eventually became liberal Westernizers and/or Jewish nationalists (most Russian nationalists came from non-elite quarters and were not liberal Westernizers; most Jewish and other nationalists did not distinguish between tribalism and liberalism). Those who did not emigrate (to the US, Israel, or Germany) lived to see their children take over the ruins.
Their children – the grandchildren of the revolution – were conceived during the Khrushchev Thaw and raised amid ‘the Brezhnev stagnation’. They inherited their parents’ social status and latter-day anti-Sovietism but not their romantic exuberance. They drank heavily, smiled knowingly, flaunted their elitism, and turned their parents’ fitful liberalism into a dogged devotion to a free world of their imagination, from uncompromising libertarianism to a cargo cult centered on blue jeans and rock and roll (the true colors of late Communism, according to the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, were King Crimson, Deep Purple, and Pink Floyd). They were shaped and deformed by irony. Every word was a hint, every look a wink, every act a parody. Their foundational text was Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, about the end of the line also being Moscow. The artistic style they generated was ‘Moscow conceptualism’, which made late socialism postmodern. (In 1975 one of my high-school friends – the son of a KGB agent – and two fellow performers built a nest and spent several hours sitting in it at an Achievements of the National Economy exhibit, hatching an egg, or perhaps the Spirit, they weren’t sure.) The economists among them made the point of learning the opposite of what they were taught and, when Boris Yeltsin appealed for help, took charge of building capitalism. The shock-therapist-in-chief, Yegor Gaidar, was born 19 March 1956, less than a month after Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’. His father was a Navy officer and head of Pravda’s military desk; his grandfather, a Civil War hero and a classic of Bolshevik children’s literature. His friends and followers from among the revolutionaries’ grandchildren formed the core of new Russia’s cultural elite. They admired the West, deplored ‘the people’, thought of their grandparents as victims of Stalinism, and raised their children as citizens of the world. Many – perhaps most – have now left Russia. My conceptualist friend lives in a psychiatric hospital and, according to a classmate of ours who visited him there several years ago, cannot stop laughing.
THE ATTACHÉ’S WIFE
Karan Mahajan
Everywhere J traveled in the country with the government press attaché, people would turn to the attaché and say, ‘But you should explain the background to him, after all he’s not from here.’
One day, exasperated, J said to the attaché, ‘Will you tell me why people keep acting this way with me? Do they sense something about how I walk? My clothes? My accent hasn’t changed at all since I left.’
The attaché smiled. ‘But they know you live abroad.’
J, an internationally syndicated columnist, had been invited by the government to write a report about the country’s progress.
‘But does that mean,’ J said, ‘does that mean I’ve lost my connection to the country, that I’m not capable of understanding it? After all, I’m from here. I grew up here. In fact, that’s why the government invited me back for this work.’
The attaché said, ‘That’s a good point,’ though he clearly didn’t believe that.
J couldn’t let it go. ‘Millions of our people live abroad. Is this how you want them to feel?’
‘But there are certain things, sir, only a local –’ The attaché held his tongue.
‘But that’s what I’m saying. What is this magical thing I don’t understand? OK, fine: I’m not aware of the name of the latest cricketer or whatever sidey politician is in charge of this district. But why is that even important? This obsession with proper nouns – that’s not wisdom. As far as I can tell, the basics of the place – the corruption, the pettiness – have not changed.’
‘It seems like you have decided on the content of your report, sir,’ the attaché mused.
‘This habit of putting people in categories. Inside, outside; upstairs, downstairs. And as far as you’re concerned, I’m outside. How could I – some foreigner with zero connection to this place – possibly understand anything about this great country? Why even invite me to make a report?’
‘No, sir, it’s so you can understand,’ the attaché said.
J was beginning to comprehend the attaché’s humor. ‘You think this, all this that I’m saying, it’s proof of being a foreigner,’ J said, ‘getting bent out of shape like this –’
‘Not in the slightest, sir,’ the attaché said, but J could swear he saw his eyes twinkling.
‘OK, let’s continue on our tour,’ J said.
But as they drove around the city, J got angrier. He remembered now why he’d left in the first place: the people of this poor hot country were smug when they had nothing to be smug about. They were petty and possessive.
I’ll write the damn report, he thought. And it’ll be damn negative.
In the middle of the night, when the attaché was asleep, he received a call.
‘I knew it!’ the voice on the other end was shouting. ‘I knew it! They don’t say this to foreign journalists, only to people like me who left!’
After getting his bearings, the attaché said sleepily, ‘Perhaps they feel you’ve outgrown our little country, sir.’
‘No, no, no, not at all! They’re angry. Angry that I got away from this place. They want to pull me down!’
‘The visit is arousing feelings for you, sir,’ the attaché said.
‘All you bloody people are!’
Then the phone was slammed down.
‘Who was that?’ the attaché’s wife asked.
‘Some foreign journalist.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘But he grew up here,’ the attaché said.
‘Ooof,’ she said.
‘And he’s angry people don’t treat him like he’s from here.’
‘He might be the first person I’ve heard of who wants to be from here,’ she said.
They both snickered.
‘Goodnight,’ he said.
‘Goodnight,’ she said.
Then, suddenly, the attaché got up. ‘Is that really what you think of our country?’
ISABEL
Lillian Fishman
From the threshold of the living room Diana observed the blonde who was presiding over the party. The room was held in a hush, and the woman on the couch twisted her hands as she spoke, until a laugh broke out and she touched her fingers to her hair.
Diana shouldered her way into the living room as the laughter quieted. The blonde was seated in the center of a large sofa, cradling a half-empty tumbler and touching thighs with a bearded man who had begun speaking to her about something apparently urgent.
‘Who is that?’ Diana said to the woman beside her.
She gestured toward the blonde with her beer bottle. ‘That’s Lucy,’ she said.
