My own son, Nikita, is, as I write this, exactly Lyudmila’s age when Martha was arrested – two months shy of four years old. He has a round face and a mop of dark hair, and his grandmother Lyudmila’s striking blue eyes. Lenina, when we went to visit a few weeks ago, hugged him so tight that he cried; she said he looked so like Lyudmila she couldn’t bear it. ‘I became a mother at twelve, when they took Mother away,’ she said. ‘Lyudmila was my first child. He’s a little Lyudmila.’
Sometimes, as I watch Nikita play, I feel-like most parents, I suppose – a flash of obscure, irrational fear. As he potters in the flowerbeds rooting for snails or digging up bulbs, absorbed in his own thoughts, I fear that my child could die, or be somehow taken from me. At other times, usually when it’s late at night and I’m drunk and far from home, on assignment in Baghdad or another of the Godforsaken hell-holes where I’ve spent much of my life since leaving Moscow, I imagine what will happen to him if I die. I wonder if he’ll manage, what he’ll remember of me, if he’ll understand, if he’ll cry. The thought of losing him is so horrifying it makes me giddy. I often think of Martha on that night and try to imagine how I would feel if it were Nikita snatched away from my arms by strangers. But I cannot picture it.
The NKVD men drove Lenina and Lyudmila to the Simferopol Prison for Underage Offenders, where they were to remain until the state determined their fate. By the grim logic of the Purge, the family members of an ‘enemy of the people’ were deemed to have been contaminated by his or her heresy, as if it were a disease. As the old Russian saying goes, ‘the apple does not fall far from the apple tree’. Therefore these two children, aged twelve and three, were doomed to suffer for their father’s sin. Like him, they were ordained by the Party to become the dross of history.
The prison was badly lit, and stank of urine, carbolic soap and coal-tar ointment. Lenina remembers the faces of the men who took down their details, the acrid smell of the crowded cell to which they were taken and told to find a space for themselves on the straw-covered floor, and the barking of the guard dogs in the corridor. Holding her moaning little sister, she cried herself to sleep.
Mila also remembers the night of her mother’s arrest. It is her earliest clear memory. She is standing in her nightshirt holding a doll, a soldier pushes her, and everyone screams. Of her brief three years and ten months of normal family life she has no recollection, except for a ghost of a memory of being carried on her father’s shoulders. From that moment on, Lenina became her little sister’s surrogate mother. Two frightened children alone in a world that had suddenly become dark and incomprehensible.
5. Prison
On a warm, foggy morning on Novoslobodskaya Street in the summer of 1995, I showed up at the gate of Butirskaya Prison, my reporter’s notebook in my back pocket. The entrance was squeezed between a hairdresser’s salon and a shop; I thought I had come to the wrong place. But through a dingy corridor between the drab Soviet buildings which lined the street, there lay a strange, closed world. Butirskaya was a vast fortress – literally a fortress, with towers, crenellations and a flock of crows wheeling around the rooftops, built by Catherine the Great for her adopted country’s numerous criminals, including the peasant rebel Emeliyan Pugachev.
Outside on the street, the dusty heat of a Moscow summer was already building. But as we were led through a small, arched gateway the June heat immediately soured into a clammy pall which settled on my skin and clothes like someone else’s sweat. Even in the administrative wing, the metallic smell of sour cabbage, cheap detergent and damp clothes was all-pervasive.
The cell I visited was about sixty feet by fifteen. A wave of male stink, rancid sweat mixed with urine, welled out as the guard opened the door. At first I thought that the prisoners were crowding towards the door to see who had come. Then, as I peered down the room, I saw that they were packed that tightly from the door to the heavy, shuttered window just visible at the far end. The cell was like a crowded Metro carriage. Two rows of wooden shelves covered in bedding and bodies ran along each wall. Rows of bunioned feet protruded from both tiers. In the space left in the middle stood a throng of men, naked except for their underwear, leaning against the bunks or perching on the ends of the beds. Some were playing cards, most of the reclining men slept, and the rest just stood, unable to move. Wet washing hung from makeshift clothes lines strung across the ceiling. A tiny, overflowing toilet and a single tap stood in the corner. The heat and humidity were so intense that it was hard to inhale, and the overpowering smell of concentrated human beings made me retch.
I pushed my way down the cell, as the guard watched from the door. It was an unwritten rule, he said later, that warders never went into the cells unless someone went berzerk, or there was a stabbing.
There were 142 men in the cell. They had empty, sunken eyes. Their legs and bodies were covered in flea bites and sores. About half had hacking, tubercular coughs, and spat copiously on the greasy floor. There was no natural light, the window was shuttered, with only two tiny sections opened to let in fresh air. The place was lit with four dim bulbs which shone sixteen hours a day.
I tried to talk to a couple of them, briefly, but it was so uncomfortable speaking to a stranger in such unnatural proximity, chest to chest, I found I had nothing to say. Neither then, nor later, could I humanize the prisoners or relate to them as people. They had passed into another reality; they had been transformed into something less than human, closer to a herd of animals. Even when they got out, I imagined, it would forever be a part of them. Whereas I, even as I squeezed among them, was merely on the outside, looking in. I could no more identify with them than I could with the mangy animals at Moscow’s sad old Zoo. Never, before or since as a reporter in Russia, did I feel more intensely that I was Just Visiting.
Their faces were the faces of men whose whole lives had imploded into the space of a few feet of the fetid room they inhabited. They stared at me as I pushed past from a distance of six inches, but when I looked into their eyes I knew they were looking at me from a distance I could never, ever cross.
There is a photograph of Lyudmila and Lenina taken some time in early 1938. Lenina is wearing a headscarf to cover her shaven head, Lyudmila is clutching a homemade rag doll with pigtails and a white cotton dress and hat. Lenina is a beautiful girl, with big eyes, a broad forehead, a delicate mouth. Lyudmila, also shaven-headed and wearing a knitted waistcoat and white collarless shirt, looks like a round-faced boy as she leans her head against her sister’s breast. Lenina’s halfsmile is wistful, and disconcertingly adult. Both sisters look haunted and serious. Their eyes are not children’s eyes. The photograph stands on my desk. Despite its familiarity, I cannot look at that image without a pang of emotion.
At dawn on their first day in prison Lenina and Lyudmila’s cellmates questioned Lenina on why they were in jail. They were all young girls, mostly thieves and prostitutes. On hearing that the newcomers weren’t criminals, just ‘politicals’, as the children of enemies of the people were called, they pinched Lenina viciously and laughed at her sobbing. Two guards, one holding a barking Alsatian, opened the cell door and ordered silence. The girls were herded into a refectory, where they lined up at a small window for a bowl of soup. One of the older girls slapped the underside of Lenina’s bowl as she came away from the window, spilling her soup on the floor, an initiation rite for the new kids. Lenina went back to the cell hungry. A few hours later a prison doctor came, diagnosed Lyudmila with measles and sent her immediately to the prison hospital, leaving Lenina alone with her tormentors.