Lenina asked her mother what was wrong. Martha didn’t answer and sent her to bed.
The previous night Sergei Kirov had been shot dead by a lone assassin in his office at the Party headquarters at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. ‘We are lost,’ Bibikov said as he wept for the death of a man he admired. But was he also weeping for himself? Weeping with anger for the mistake he had made in identifying himself too closely with the losing side? For all his cultivated proletarian bluffness, Bibikov must have been a political animal, a committee man, with a rising star’s sense of the way the wind was blowing. As Bibikov lay on the sofa weeping for Kirov, he must have turned over those now-dangerous January conversations in his mind, wondering whether he had said too much.
And yet the hammer did not fall at once. Stalin, too, wept in public at Kirov’s funeral, and acted as chief pallbearer, leading the nation in mourning. There was time enough to take revenge on the enemies in the heart of the Party which Stalin had identified at the congress.
On a local level, the Party machine continued to run smoothly. The KhTZ’s production levels climbed to greater heights and the famine mercifully abated – if only because the millions of dead no longer needed to be fed. Bibikov, along with three other members of the KhTZ’s management, was awarded the Order of Lenin, number 301, in a plush velvet box. It was a recognized prelude to greater things. In late 1935, the expected promotion came, to Provincial Party Secretary of the Chernigov region in the rolling farm country of the northern Ukraine. Bibikov was just thirty-two years old, well on his way to a high-flying future – perhaps membership of the Ukrainian or national Party Central Committee. Maybe higher still.
After the belching factory smokestacks and screeching rail junctions of Kharkov, Chernigov must have seemed like a step back into a slower, older Russia. The Chernigov Kremlin, with its medieval cathedrals, stands on the high bank of the sluggish River Desna. Wooded parkland comes right up to the centre of the city, and in summer the air is filled with pollen from poplar trees which line the streets. The squat, ornamented houses built by Chernigov’s wealthy merchants still stand, and the place has retained an air of pre-revolutionary bourgeois respectability. The town has many great churches which somehow escaped the Bolsheviks’ dynamite. Chernigov was too out-of-the-way, perhaps, to warrant a thorough purge of religious buildings, too far from the great industrial heartlands of the eastern Ukraine where the future of Socialism was being forged. It was a backwater, but Bibikov was sure that if he made a success of his new Party job he would not be tarrying long.
The Bibikovs lived the life of the privileged. Already the Spartan Party ethic of the early thirties was slackening. The élite quickly accrued perks which set them above their fellow citizens. Martha shopped at exclusive Party grocers’, and Bibikov was entitled to holidays in specially built sanatoriums on the Black Sea. Every month, Bibikov would give Martha a little book of coupons for imported food, textiles and shoes from the Insnab, or ‘Foreign Supply’ shop. The family moved into a large four-room apartment with handsome furniture, confiscated from a wealthy merchant family for the use of Chernigov’s new rulers. There, Varya scrubbed the Bibikovs’ pans with brick dust until they shone.
Boris installed shelves right up to the high ceiling of his study and filled them with books which he read in his big leather armchair. On his way back from work he’d stop in to the local bookshop and buy children’s books for the girls and ideological tomes for himself. When Martha shouted at Lenina she would tiptoe into Bibikov’s study and climb into his lap, sobbing. ‘Let’s not complain about her,’ he would say. ‘Let’s strengthen our Union instead.’ It was a joking reference to the current Party-speak.
During their first winter in Chernigov the Bibikov girls wowed the town with their wrought-iron sled, made for them by their old neighbour in Kharkov, which drew crowds of envious children to behold this wonder under the steep earth ramparts of the Kremlin, perfect for tobogganing. In summer Martha made the girls fashionable white cloche hats, copied from Moscow fashion plates, and sewed them dresses from imported printed cotton. In keeping with her new status as an élite wife she began calling herself ‘Mara’ because she felt that ‘Martha’ sounded too peasant-like – an odd twist of social snobbery in the land of proletarian dictatorship. Bibikov was as much a workaholic as ever, but began to spend more time chatting – but not drinking – in his kitchen with Party comrades. He bought season tickets to the newly built theatre for Martha and Lenina, though he himself couldn’t go because he worked until nine each night, by which time the play was already nearly over.
Lenina had never been so happy as during those days of her secret alliance with her beloved father. ‘I see it now so clearly,’ she told me, nearly a lifetime later. ‘I see it like a dream. It’s hard to believe it ever really happened.’
Bibikov even began to relax enough to philander – or at least, to philander more openly. Lenina remembers Martha screaming at him in the kitchen, berating him about his various mistresses. It was during this time, January 1936, when all Party members were required to renew their Party cards so that unworthy elements could be weeded out, that the portrait photo we have of him in his Party tunic was taken. Perhaps the hard-set face also shows a trace of smugness, of self-congratulation.
But behind the outward normality of Ukrainian small-town life, the country was drifting into madness. The NKVD, now under the leadership of the ruthless and sadistic Nikolai Yezhov, was preparing to unleash yet another civil war. This time it was not to be on the Whites or the peasants, but against the most insidious enemy of all, traitors within the Party itself.
Old Bolsheviks whose long standing and moral authority could challenge Stalin’s position went first. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, both members of Lenin’s first Politburo, stood to attention at show trials in Moscow in August 1936 and confessed to being imperialist spies, while being hectored by the hysterical Prosecutor-General, Andrei Vyshinsky. ‘Wreckers’, or senior engineers blamed for sabotaging the industrialization drive, were also put on public trial. They confessed to being members of a counter-revolutionary organization determined to subvert the triumph of Socialism. Stalin’s rival Lev Trotsky, the head of the alleged counterrevolutionary movement, had already fled into exile on the island of Buyukada, near Istanbul. The vocabulary and tactics of the coming Great Purge were being rehearsed and refined.
Until 1937 the Ukraine was a relative sanctuary from the show trials that were decimating the Moscow-based élite of the army, intelligentsia and government. But it was the Ukraine, perceived by Stalin to be a den of Trotskyism and potential opposition, which was to feel the full brunt of his wrath when he finally unleashed the might of the security machine he had so carefully constructed.
At the February-March 1937 plenum of top Party members, Stalin’s opponents made a last, doomed stand, protesting against Stalin’s monopoly of power. Immediately after the meeting a fifth of the Ukrainian Party leadership were expelled. Bibikov, reading the curt announcement in Pravda, must have feared that worse was to come. By early summer close colleagues began to be summoned for questioning by the NKVD. Few returned.
People instinctively drew into themselves, huddling into self-protective silence like pedestrians hurrying home during a summer rainstorm. Lenina noticed a sudden change in atmosphere. Her father was looking tired and had lost much of his usual jollity. The friendly gossip of the Party wives on the stairwell had become nervous pleasantries. It must have been with relief that Bibikov prepared for his summer trip to a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Georgian Black Sea coast, in July 1937.