As she spoke, I passed up to her the simple steel plate: one sign, one name, one life out of the millions killed during the Great Terror. While signing a long execution list, Stalin was reported to have muttered: ‘Who’s going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years time? No one.’
But Alexa – alongside other student activists, independent journalists and historians – was encouraging the act of remembrance. So I asked her, as she bolted Lydia Bogdanova’s plaque onto the wall, why so many of her countrymen preferred to forget?
‘Russians do not forget but they have chosen not to remember,’ she replied, her voice echoing down the street where the deceased had once walked, talked and wept. ‘Do you know about the “mother” of the gulag?’ she asked me.
I did. Stalin’s first ‘corrective’ labour camp had been a repurposed monastery 600 miles north of St Petersburg on the Solovetsky Islands. Tens of thousands of his victims had been incarcerated there.
‘It’s become a museum of political repression, hasn’t it?’ I said.
‘It was for a while,’ she replied. ‘Now old camp guards get together there to celebrate the founding of the gulag system.’
I had first learned about Solovetsky, and the work of ‘Last Address’, in Moscow. In a nondescript block off the Garden Ring, I’d been moved to tears in a basement archive to victims of the camps. In filing cabinets and on open shelves were millions of items donated by their families: hundreds of children’s letters begging Stalin for their parents’ release, notes thrown from sealed railway carriages, pine-needle dolls made by inmates for deserted daughters, threadbare prison jackets and spent bullets. During the Terror few people knew why they’d been arrested. Most assumed that it was an administrative cock-up, a matter of mistaken identity. Few comprehended that their lives could be for ever changed because of a flippant remark or postcard from abroad. No one knew where they were to be taken; loaded onto cattle trucks, shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to the railhead, forced to walk into the wilderness and – on arrival – even build their own prisons.
After the archive, I’d gone to Lubyanka. In Soviet times the KGB’s headquarters had been called the tallest building in Moscow, because Siberia could be seen from its basement. For decades its founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had dominated the central Moscow square, both in the iniquitous organisation and with his statue. In 1991 a crowd of protesters had torn him down but his mendacious KGB meat grinder remained, the ochre facade and terracotta cornices of its palace glowering across the city.
I’d sat in the sunshine listening to the traffic sigh around the square, watching its clerks and secretaries settle on park benches during their lunch break. One woman had tripped on her heels and fallen, grazing her knee. She’d grumbled to friends about her ruined stocking, paying no heed to the Solovetsky Stone. The massive granite rock had been hewn from the White Sea island and mounted in the square at a canted angle as if about to fall; inert yet laden with poignancy.
Every autumn hundreds of mourners queued beside it to read out loud the name, age, profession and execution date of Stalin’s victims. Some years the queue was so long that people had to wait an hour for their turn at the microphone. The ceremony was known as the ‘Return of the Names’ and, at the present rate, it will take more than a century to read out the names of all the dead.
As the clerks had finished their lunch and returned to their desks, to an afternoon of filing surveillance requests or operating security cameras, I’d decided to travel to Solovetsky, to a holy and haunted place so remote that ‘a scream from here would never be heard’ according to Solzhenitsyn. It would be my last stop in Russia.
Back in St Petersburg, Alexa packed her tool box and loaded it into an ageing grey minivan. Together we lashed the ladder to its roof rack.
‘Our terrible history is almost too much to bear. Shame and complicity is modern Russia, as is this,’ she said, gesturing at the plaque. ‘“Last Address” is our response to the amnesia, to the guilt and sorrow, to the lie that Stalin created a great country.’
Beyond her a street sweeper broomed autumn leaves into piles along Bolshaya Pushkarskaya. A sudden gust of wind caught them, spinning them in a vortex around the hapless man. He picked up his broom again and, like a long-suffering Sisyphus, swept them back into piles.
16
Angels
She was an angel, glowing in the setting sun. As the aircraft turned, its last rays brushed the short hairs on her forearm. Life throbbed beneath them and her woven leather bracelet, under a simple wrist tattoo, at the ends of slender fingers tipped with chipped purple nail varnish. In the golden light the young woman looked as if she’d flown out of a fifteenth-century Rostov icon or Chagall oil, apart from the black jeans and chequered blouse that hung loose around her hips. I guessed that she was returning home to Arkhangelsk from university, or about to start her first job as a teacher. In the palm of her hand she cupped an inflight sandwich as if it were a timid bird. She raised it to her lips, taking care so it did not take wing, and took a small bite.
Then the sun fell behind us and the neon cabin lights shuddered to life, revealing to me the true woman: tired eyes, dry skin, mortal. She was no student or young teacher, not any longer. She was a wage slave, or perhaps a divorcee at the end of a journey rather than the beginning, just getting by, just counting the days. She folded the waxed sandwich wrapper in half, then half again, pinching the edges hard with her nails as if fixing time in origami. She gazed down at the dusting of snow along the sea’s edge. Away to the north stretched white land and grey water.
I turned away to explain the plan to Sami, again – land in Arkhangelsk, change planes for the Solovetsky Islands, spend a few days on the archipelago, then send him north to Murmansk – but he didn’t hear me. As so often now he was plugged into his headphones. He’d come back to the hotel with renewed determination. His new way out, gleaned from fellow migrants, sounded so unlikely that I wondered if a rubber dinghy across the Barents Sea really would be a more sensible route. At least our trajectories were aligned for one last time, until we touched down and my arrangements crumbled.
The United Aviation Antonov couldn’t make the short hop to Solovki, whether because of an oil leak, bad weather or pilot inebriation I couldn’t tell, and Nordavia’s flights to the islands were fully booked for the next fortnight. Our only option was to take a boat, but to reach Kem – Solovki’s mainland port – we had to catch an overnight train.
In the taxi Arkhangelsk revealed itself in fuming chimneys, skeletal cranes and monstrous piers. Around them on the headland massed black cargo barges and staggering sailors. The city’s last wooden neighbourhood – its ancient timbers weathered stone grey – was squeezed between overbearing concrete blocks. Our train cut through them and the late afternoon, rolling south and west past overgrown railway tracks lined with abandoned freight cars and clumps of spindly trees. Beneath the Severodvinsk Bridge the Dvina shone like burnished silver, possibly from the mercury that was pumped into it by the upstream pulp and timber mills.