The old buildings of the orphanage where my mother had spent most of her childhood stood on the edge of the forest. The current generation of orphans was away at summer camp; the place was deserted. It had the melancholy feel of children’s institutions when the children are away, an air of regimented jollity, and the poignancy of children’s loneliness.
Yet Mila was happy at Saltykovka, as happy as anywhere else she could remember. She went to her first normal school, and loved it. Her years of enforced idleness in hospital beds had taught her to love books, and Lenina would bring her novels from Yakov’s library, which she read voraciously. The schoolmistresses were strict and dedicated, pedagogues of the old school, drilling their pupils in correct Russian grammar and the works of Pushkin. On Sundays, soldiers would come and take the children to a nearby cinema in big army trucks.
Mila remembers sitting for hours on the lap of the elderly peasant woman who stoked the bath-house furnace as she combed out the lice from the children’s hair. One of the teachers, Maria Nikolaevna Kharlamova, spent hours of her own time coaching my mother in Russian literature and history.
When my mother and I knocked on Maria Nikolaevna’s door she recognized my mother immediately, and burst into tears.
‘Milochkal Can it be you?’ she kept repeating as they embraced.
Maria Nikolaevna fussed over tea and home-made jam for us both, then as we sat at her kitchen table she hunted through piles of old papers to retrieve a little envelope of local newspaper clippings she had kept on Lyudmila – news of her admission to Moscow University, news of her prizewinning ‘Red Diploma’ on graduation.
‘I was so proud of you!’ Maria Nikolaevna whispered, staring across the rickety table at her star pupil with all the satisfaction of an elderly mother. ‘I was proud of all of you.’
Mila also spent months at a time away from Saltykovka, enduring painful operations on her leg and hip in the Botkin Hospital in central Moscow. The deformities wreaked by her childhood tuberculosis had left one leg sixteen centimetres shorter than the other, and when she was fifteen the Botkin surgeons had to break the bone and put weights on Lyudmila’s leg to make it grow longer.
When she was allowed back from the oppressive silence of the hospital wards to the clamour of Saltykovka, Mila threw herself into games and group activities. She was always a leader, a Young Pioneer ‘Activist’, a leader of the Communist version of the Scouts or Guides, with a special badge on her white shirt to show her status. ‘In place of arms, we have steel wings; In place of a heart, a fiery engine,’ went a stirring song of the time, and Mila, despite her disability, tried hard to live up to the ideal.
Mila was outspoken, too, and thoughtful. Both were dangerous habits, even in school. One day shortly after the end of the war, during an obligatory classroom reading of the editorial page of Pionerskaya Pravda (the children’s version of the great Party newspaper), the teacher recited the new anti- American rhetoric. Mila put up her hand in the approved Pioneer fashion – fingers pointing straight up to the ceiling, elbow on the desk – to ask a question.
‘But the Americans helped us a lot during the war, didn’t they?’ she asked.
The teacher was horrified and sent Mila immediately to the headmaster, who hastily convened a session of the druzina, a supposedly informal children’s court which was the junior equivalent of a Party meeting. Dutifully assembled, Mila’s classroom colleagues pronounced that she must be more attentive to political education, and formally censured her. It was not the only time she would face such a hypocrites’ court.
There was a burning will in that crippled little body, even then. Later, she wrote to her future husband, my father, of her refusal to compromise, to accept the realities of Soviet life. ‘I want life to show me in practice the strength of my principles,’ she wrote. ‘I want it, I want it, I want it.’ In a world where the most her contemporaries aspired to was to get by, to do the best they could with what they had, Mila believed that her will could conquer the world. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko called the anti-hero of his and Mila’s generation ‘Comrade Kompromis Kompromisovich’ in sardonic tribute to the men and women who negotiated their way through the hypocrisy and disappointments of Soviet life by a million small compromises. Mila was not one of them.
Despite her crippled leg, Mila became skipping champion of her class. At Saltykovka she organized class lice checks and hikes, singing sessions and games of hopscotch. When she visited her sister on Herzen Street she’d throw herself into the street’s hopscotch championships, chalking the boxes on the asphalt with the neighbours’ children. Lyudmila almost always emerged as the winner, even on one occasion when she had to compete with a broken arm in a plaster cast.
News of victory came sonorously over the radio on 9 May 1945. Lenina heard the radio announcement at the Dynamo factory. She remembers feeling infinite relief, and an overwhelming weariness. A few days later there was a parade of German prisoners down the Garden Ring road, and Lenina went to the top of Herzen Street to see the enemy at first hand. The crowds watched in silence. She noticed the strong smell of the leather of the German prisoners’ boots and webbing. They walked in good order, expressionless. The prisoners were followed ostentatiously by trucks spraying the street to wash away the contagion of the Fascist presence. Fewer than one in ten of the prisoners would ever return to their homeland.
Yakov moved his family into a larger, more stylish apartment. He had acquired a trophy Mercedes looted from Germany on a trip otherwise devoted to dismantling German rocketry laboratories and shipping them back wholesale to the Lavochkin Construction Bureau in Moscow. The Mercedes was a huge black shining beast, the mark of giddying rank. Yakov would drive around Moscow giving lifts to young girls in his car, a pastime which Varvara eventually discovered and which threw her into violent frenzies of jealousy. Yakov’s new job as head of the Soviet Union’s fledgling rocket programme, staffed by captured German scientists, opened a world of privilege to his family, which they were in no hurry to share with their poor relatives. For Lenina and Lyudmila, the drabness of wartime austerity continued for years after the end of the war. But there were plenty of bright parades full of gaudy paper slogans and banners, and a great sense of pride and achievement. Whenever Lenina and Sasha, medals arrayed on his chest, would walk with their new baby Nadia it seemed that she had, at last, escaped the wreckage of her childhood.
Boris Bibikov was due to be released from prison in June 1947, according to his official sentence of ‘ten years without the right of correspondence’. Despite the slim chance that he could have survived the camps and the war, Lenina continued to hope that he would return.
Even after what they had been through, the Bibikov family retained a naïve faith in the essential probity and rightness of the Soviet system. Like tens of millions of other relatives of the victims of the Purges, they believed that their loved one had suffered an injustice which was exceptional. Boris’s mother Sophia wrote letters to the Interior Ministry asking for news of her son in the unshakeable belief that justice would eventually prevail. For years she received no answer, yet the faith remained. But Boris’s release date came and went with no news.
In the winter of 1948, Lenina, pregnant with her second child, went to stay for a few months with Sasha’s mother Praskovia in a village twenty miles from Kaluga, in central Russia where fresh milk was plentiful and where the village women could look after young Nadia as Lenina waited for the new arrival. Sasha was studying law in Moscow; every Saturday night he’d take the train to Kaluga with a battered bicycle he’d repaired himself, cycle (with one leg) to the village, spend the day with his family, and cycle back in the evening to catch the Moscow train.