If Stalin had not died on 5 March 1953 of a brain haemorrhage, my mother’s life would have been very different. The news of the dictator’s death was broken to the children at Saltykovka by the head teacher, near-hysterical with grief, and all the children burst into tears at the news. For many of the orphans, the avuncular, mustachioed great leader was the closest thing they had ever known to a real father. In Moscow, Lenina stood in the two-million-strong crowds at Stalin’s funeral. She, too, wept genuine tears for the passing of Stalin, without ever thinking that this kindly, smiling man was responsible for taking her parents away from her.
With Stalin gone, Lyudmila’s world tilted on its axis. She graduated from the Saltykovka school top of her class, with a near-perfect grade (she still remembers the mistake that cost her a perfect score: mistakenly putting a comma in the sentence ‘hippopotamuses, and elephants’). Under Stalin, a place at a prestigious university would have been unthinkable for a child of an enemy of the people. Mila would probably have gone to a provincial teachers’ training college, and spent her life as a schoolmistress.
But now Lenina dared to hope that the stain on her sister’s record could be overlooked. She was now working as a copy editor of doctoral theses at the Institute of Jurisprudence, a job wangled for her by Sasha. Lenina found an acquaintance who knew the Rector of the History faculty of Moscow State University, and arranged a meeting to lobby for Lyudmila’s admission. She was lucky. The man was either simply kindhearted, or bore secret scars of his own from life under Stalin. As Lenina explained what had happened to her and her sister since their parents’ arrest, the man broke down in tears. In September 1953 Lyudmila was admitted to read history at the Soviet Union’s most prestigious university, housed in a vast, newly constructed Stalinist skyscraper on the Lenin Hills – a palace of Socialist learning with all of Moscow spread at its feet. When she heard the news, she says, ‘I grew wings.’
Stalin’s death also brought the hope that their father might be released from the Gulag. In 1954 the MVD, the latest incarnation of the NKVD, broke their seventeen-year silence on the fate of Boris Bibikov. In response to yet another letter from his mother they replied, in terse officialese, that Bibikov, B.L., had died of cancer in 1944 in a prison camp. The next year Sophia wrote a personal plea to Stalin’s successor, the new Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, that at least his name be cleared. The letter was duly entered into her late son’s file.
‘Respected Nikita Sergeyevich,’ she wrote. ‘I am turning to you as an old woman, a mother who had three sons, three Communists. Only one is left [Yakov], who serves in the ranks of our glorious Soviet Army. One [Isaac] diedon the front in the Great Patriotic War, defending our Motherland. The other, Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, was arrested in 1937 as an enemy of the people and sentenced to ten years. His term should have expired in 1947.
‘Nikita Sergeyevich, my son… I feel, I am sure that Boris was innocent, that there was a mistake. Is it not possible after eighteen years to sort the matter out, and rehabilitate him? I still cannot find the truth, to know, in the end, what happened. I am not a Party member, I am eighty years old, but I honestly raised my children to love their Motherland and to serve her faithfully. They gave her their knowledge, their health, their lives, for the joy of Communism, for peace on earth, so that their great Motherland would prosper… Dear Nikita Sergeyevich, I ask you to look into this matter as a Communist, and if my son is innocent, to rehabilitate him. Respectfully yours, Bibikova.’
Boris Bibikov’s case was re-opened in 1955, one of the very first wave of the so-called rehabilitation investigations, judicial reviews of the victims of the Purges ordered by Khrushchev in the wake of his ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin at the Twentieth All-Union Party Congress. The task of reviewing Bibikov’s case, and thousands like it, was a colossal bureau- cratic undertaking. Detailed depositions were taken from dozens of witnesses who knew Boris Bibikov and the files of everyone involved in his case were closely studied. Ironically, the part of the file covering the rehabilitation investigation was almost three times longer than the spare seventy-nine documents it took to arrest, convict and kill him.
All those who were questioned about Boris’s supposed counter-revolutionary activities pronounced him a sincere and dedicated Communist.
‘I can only describe him positively; he gave himself wholly to the Party and to the life of the factory and had tremendous authority among the workers,’ Ivan Kavitsky, Boris’s deputy at the KhTZ, told the investigators. ‘I know nothing of his anti-Soviet activities – on the contrary, he was a devoted Communist.’
‘I never heard of any political deviation on [Bibikov’s] part. People said he had been arrested as an enemy of the people but no one knew why,’ said Lev Veselov, a factory accountant.
‘I remember that my comrades in the management expressed surprise when he was arrested,’ said the typist Olga Irzhavskaya.
On 22 February 1956, a closed session of the Supreme Court of the USSR produced a lengthy report, marked ‘Secret’, formally overturning the decision of the Military Collegium reached on 13 October 1937. A short note was sent to Boris’s family announcing his rehabilitation, along with a death certificate. The ‘cause of death’ clause was left blank.
University was heaven for Lyudmila. She moved into a hall of residence at Stromynka Street in Sokolniki in north Moscow, where she shared a dormitory with fifteen other girls. In time she moved to her own room in the main university building itself, in its spreading grounds in the Lenin Hills. Her whole childhood had been spent in Soviet institutions, and the crowded social life of the university was a decent substitute for a family. She immediately made lifelong friends among the brightest of her generation. One was Yury Afanasiyev, a stocky, outspoken fellow historian who was to become one of the intellectual leading lights of Perestroika. Another contemporary was a former farm boy from Stavropol with a thick country accent and a total lack of cosmopolitan irony about Soviet life which Mila and her friends were quickly developing. He tried doggedly to court Lenina’s friend, Nadia Mikhailova, who found him insufferably provincial and repeatedly turned him down. His name was Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. ‘How can a descendent of a prosperous Moscow merchant marry a Stavropol truck driver?’ Nadia used to joke.
Lyudmila learned good French and some basic Latin and German, and the art of outward conformity and hard work. Her essays, written in a perfect copperplate hand, are models of thoroughness and diligence. She was a creature of the Soviet system which had brought her up, with its emphasis on hearty communal activity and its complete lack of physical or mental privacy. The student life of the 1950s was filled with semi-voluntary after-class readings of Moliere, nature rambles and amateur dramatics. But despite the constraints of ideology and communal life, Mila felt exhilaratingly free, at last, to explore the foreign and limitless world of literature. She read Dumas and Hugo, Zola and Dostoyevsky, the sentimental outpourings of Alexander Grin and the pastorals of Ivan Bunin. There, in books, music and theatre, she finally found her own private window on to a world big enough for her huge energies.