The Lubyanka, an old insurance company headquarters, in whose deep interior the body of the citizen has known terrible attentions, is just across the street. In 1937, Stalin’s secret police uncovered ‘Trotskyites’ and ‘saboteurs’ among the staff at Gosbani No. 1, and brought them the short distance up the hill, into its darkness. Polina Zhemchuzhina spent many months in the cells of the Lubyanka, where she was interrogated day after day, accused of every kind of treachery against the state, from ‘criminal contacts with Jewish nationalists’ to orgies with workers in the Ministry of Light Industry. In her secret police file, there is a letter from her friend Galina Serebryakova, written to Zhemchuzhina from the Gulag, and a letter to her brother, who emigrated to America after the Revolution, changed his name to Sam Karp, and made good. Zhemchuzhina had been accused, among other things, of having once attended a memorial service at a synagogue. In her four-volume file, there is also a scrap of paper with her handwriting on it: ‘with these four years of separation four eternities have flowed over my strange and terrible life’, she wrote to an unnamed addressee; ‘only the thought of you forces me to live, and the knowledge that you may still need the remnants of my tormented heart …’ ‘Security had done a thorough job on her,’ Molotov remembered, ‘they had outdone themselves.’ Beria would walk past him at Politburo meetings and hiss in his ear, ‘Polina is alive!’ ‘She was in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow,’ Molotov said, ‘and I didn’t even know she was there.’
Gigantic and immoderate, as closed and featureless as an Egyptian pyramid, the second secret police building, raised in dark granite, iron and black marble on the site of the demolished buildings of No. 24 Kuznetsky Most in the last years of Yuri Andropov’s long tenure as Chairman of the KGB, expresses nothing but its own massing of adamant power. When Andropov (whose memorial plaque on the wall of the Lubyanka former KGB agent Vladimir Putin unveiled in one of the first acts of his presidency) became General Secretary of the Party in 1982, he chose to initiate a grand reform of the whole Soviet system by ordering a clean-up of the corruption at the Sandunovskaya Bathhouse down the hill.
FOUR
Lutsino
‘Zvenigorod (I still rejoiced at that wonderful name) …’
MARINA TSVETAEVA
After several years in Moscow, we acknowledged the good sense of the way in which Russian life, across the social classes, is clearly divided into work time in the city and ‘rest’ na dache. We found a dacha to rent in the Academy of Sciences colony above the Moscow River at Lutsino, a village close to the ancient town of Zvenigorod, an hour’s drive west of the city. When we first saw dacha No. 3, its paint was blotched and flaking, its verandahs draped with dead creepers. Nina Balandina, our landlady, used our first month’s rent to have the dacha painted greeny-blue and the former chauffeur’s quarters, in which she lived, pale yellow. When October came she asked us to rake and burn the fallen leaves and pine needles and feed the ash from our slow bonfires to the shrubs that she had planted with her mother when Academician Balandin came back from the Gulag. We sat outside till late, drinking wine and roasting potatoes in soft caverns beneath the flames, and left the fire, fragrant with damp pine bark, twisting smoke till morning. We pulled up nettles behind the dacha, and cut back the rowanberry branches that had crossed Nina’s narrow path through the garden to the fenced boundary of the colony, where the forest ends. She laughed with good humour at our unruly dog, who had no feeling for property rights and treated her as an intruder, barking and running frantic circles round her as she limped across the garden every morning and evening, to and from the village church of St Nikola the Miracle-Worker. Nina had spent most of her childhood summers here, apart from the interval in her early teens between 1949 and Stalin’s death in 1953, lost years her father (like so many Gulag survivors) never discussed, when, after his second arrest, he was an ‘enemy of the people’ and his dacha was confiscated.
Alexei Balandin was first arrested, as a ‘socially dangerous element’, in the summer of 1936, and taken from Butyrka prison to a former monastery at Voronovo, at which high-ranking members of the NKVD interrogated, tortured and shot political prisoners. It was a miracle, believes Nina (who traces a pattern of miracles in her family’s past), that her father was not arrested a year later in 1937, when the bacchanal of state murder was in its frenzy. Two of Balandin’s graduate students, the ‘anti-Soviet terrorists’ Vadim Usinin and Vasili Agapov, denounced their professor, under torture, as part of a Trotskyite terrorist group, alleged to be using the laboratories of the Chemistry Faculty of Moscow University to make explosives. Balandin was sentenced to ‘administrative exile’ in the distant city of Orenburg. Eminent colleagues petitioned Molotov in person; but by then, Nina says, Comrade Molotov was indifferent to name or scientific prestige. (In conversation Nina referred to Molotov and Stalin as ‘Comrade’.) The intercession of the Chief Prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinsky, was another miracle. Vyshinsky personally ordered Balandin’s release from exile in 1939, allowing him to return to his research in organic catalytics, for which, in the 1940s, he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences and awarded a Stalin Prize and the title to dacha No. 3.
When the KGB archives opened in the early 1990s, Nina read the protocols of her father’s interrogations. During his months in Butyrka and the Lubyanka, charged with ‘crimes against Soviet power’, the only thing for which Balandin admitted guilt was concealment of his social origins. If he had signed any other ‘confession’, Nina’s mother would never have been able to secure his amnesty so soon after Stalin’s death, and he might never have known rest in the golden light of Lutsino again. Her mother found a good advocate who saved him, as Nina told us more than once. Though he had only done a few months of ‘black work’ in the nickel mines at Norilsk before being moved, along with several atomic physicists and flying aces, into the metallurgical plant, his health was broken. He had shared freezing barracks with common criminals, his fur hat was stolen in winter, and he took a knife wound in the stomach in a fight over a rouble. While he was in the Arctic, fellow scientists were forbidden to use his name or mention his theories in publications, or even at conferences on the subject of his work.
You never recover, Nina said. Her father was always on her mind. He left her wealthy in real estate, with a dacha in a good colony and a large Moscow apartment on the Garden Ring opposite the US Embassy, but she lived ascetically in her barely furnished yellow house, sleeping little, ordering her days to the practice of the Orthodox faith, which she had come to in the last years of Soviet power through the teachings of the priest Alexander Men. When the weather turned cold, her face became red and chapped. In November, at the edge of winter, the grass was laid flat and matted with fine frost, the nettles darkened and wilted, expiring elegantly on a couch of papery dead leaves. Woodpeckers tapped urgently, high on the bare trunks of the pines. Nina put galoshes over her shoes and wore her dirty turquoise anorak, the ragged synthetic fur on its hood mingling with her wispy grey hair. Her step across the garden became slower, more pained.