Though Martha didn’t know it at the time, her husband was still a free man, relaxing in a first-class sleeper coach heading south and innocently looking forward to his well-earned days of rest at the Party sanatorium.
2. ‘Not Men but Giants!’
Lads, let’s fulfil the Plan!
There are only two surviving photographs of Boris Bibikov.
One is an informal group shot taken at the Kharkov Tractor Factory around 1932. He is sitting on the ground in front of two dozen fresh-faced, beaming young workers, his arm around the shoulder of a crew-cut young man. Bibikov is wearing a rumpled, open-necked shirt and his head is shaven, in the proletarian style affected by many of his generation of Party cadres. Unlike everyone else in the photo, there is no smile on his face, only a severe glare.
The other photo, from his Party card, was taken early in 1936. Bibikov is wearing a Party cadre’s tunic, buttoned to the neck, and he once again stares purposefully from the frame. There is more than a hint of cruelty in his down-turned mouth. He is every inch the ruthless Party man. The formality of the pose and the fact that Bibikov was born in an age before one felt entirely unselfconscious in front of a camera mean that the mask is near perfect. There is no hint of the man in either picture, only of the man he wanted to be.
He died a man without a past. Like many of his age and class, Bibikov shed his former self like a shameful skin, to be reborn as a Homo Sovieticus, a new Soviet man. He reinvented himself so effectively that even the NKVD investigators who painstakingly chronicled his passage through the NKVD’s ‘meat grinder’ in the summer and autumn of 1937 were able to unearth only the merest trace of his former existence. There were no photos, no papers, no records of his life before the Party.
His family were descended from one of Catherine the Great’s generals, Alexander Bibikov, who earned the Empress’s favour and a noble title by putting down a peasant uprising led by Emeliyan Pugachev in 1773. The revolt was crushed with great brutality, just as the Empress ordered; summary hangings and beatings were meted out to thousands of rebels who had dared to defy the state.
Boris Bibikov was born in the Crimea in 1903 or 1904 – his NKVD file says the former, his mother writes the latter. His father Lev, a small landowner, died when Boris and his two brothers, Yakov and Isaac, were very young. Bibikov never talked about him. Their mother, Sofia, was a Jewess from a well-to-do Crimean merchant family whose father Naum owned a flour mill and a grain elevator, which could account for the odd ‘profession’ Bibikov listed on his arrest form, ‘mill worker’. Boris knew English, he did not fight in the Civil War. That is just about all we know of his early life. Yakov, the only one of the Bibikov brothers to survive past the Second World War, who lived until 1979, was similarly obsessive – he never mentioned his background, or his executed brother. For the Bibikov brothers there was only the future, no looking back.
I don’t believe that my grandfather was a hero, but he lived in heroic times, and such times brought out an impulse to greatness in people large and small. The slogans of the Bolshevik Revolution were Peace, Land and Bread; and at the time this message must, to ambitious and idealistic men, have seemed fresh, vibrant and couched in the language of prophesy. The Party’s cadres were to be nothing less than the avant-garde of world history. At some point soon after the October Revolution swept away the old Russia Bibikov seems, like many members of the ‘former classes’, to have had some sort of romantic epiphany. Or perhaps – who now knows – it was an impulse of ambition, vanity or greed. His inheritance, his maternal grandfather’s minor Crimean flour-milling empire, was nationalized in 1918. Many of his grander relatives in Moscow and Petrograd had fled into exile or been arrested as class enemies. The Bolsheviks were Russia’s new masters, and the route to advancement for an energetic and intelligent young man was to join the winning side, as quickly as possible.
But the only witness we have left is Lenina, and her testimony is that her father was a high-minded and selfless man. And even if that wasn’t the case, Lenina’s word has a kind of emotional truth of its own. So let us say that a new world was being built, and Boris’s imagination was caught by the grandeur of the vision, fresh, new and beautiful, and so he and his two younger brothers, Yakov and Isaac, threw themselves wholeheartedly into it.
During the last year of the Civil War Boris enrolled in the newly opened Higher Party School in the Crimean port of Simferopol. The school was designed to train a new generation of commissars to rule the great empire which the Bolsheviks had recently won, much to their own surprise. After a year’s training in theoretical Marxist-Leninism and the rudiments of agitation and propaganda, my grandfather was inducted into the Party in May 1924, a young firebrand of twenty-one, ready to serve the Revolution wherever it needed him.
As it turned out, the Revolution’s most pressing immediate need was a prosaic one. Boris was sent to supervise the summer tomato and aubergine harvest at a fledgling collective farm in Kurman Kimilchi, a former Tatar settlement populated for two centuries by ethnic Germans, in the highlands of the Crimean peninsula. It was there, in the dusty summer fields, that he met his future wife, Martha Platonovna Shcherbak.
A few weeks before she met Boris, Martha Shcherbak had left her younger sister Anna to die on a train platform in Simferopol.
The two girls were on their way from their native village near Poltava, in the western Ukraine, to look for summer work on the farms of the Crimea. Martha, already twenty-three years old, was well past the age when peasant girls of her generation were expected to marry. They came from a family of eleven sisters; two brothers had died in infancy. There is little doubt that her father, Platon, considered having so many daughters nothing less than a curse and seems to have been only too glad to get rid of two of them.
Martha grew up amid the brooding suspicion and casual brutality of a dirt-poor village on the Ukrainian steppes. But even by the hard standards of Russian peasant life, her siblings found Martha quarrelsome, jealous and difficult. That may explain why she had failed to find a husband in her village, and why she and Anna were the two sisters deemed surplus to requirements and sent away to fend for themselves. Her father’s rejection was the first, and perhaps deepest, of the many scars on her mind which were to develop into a deep, vicious streak.
By the time Anna and Martha reached Simferopol they had been living rough for at least a week, travelling on local trains and catching lifts on produce trucks. Anna had developed a fever, and in the crowds thronging the sweltering railway platform she fell into a dead faint. People gathered around the girl, who was turning blue and shivering. Someone shouted ‘Typhus!’ and panic spread. Martha stepped away from her sister, and turned to flee with the rest.
Martha was young, frightened, and alone for the first time after a life in the oppressive intimacy of the family’s wooden farmhouse. Her fear of being quarantined in one of the notorious and deadly local typhus hospitals was perhaps rational enough. But her decision to abandon her sister was to haunt her for the rest of her life, an original sin for which she was cruelly punished. Driven by fear, no doubt, and confusion, Martha disclaimed all knowledge of the feverish teenager sprawled on the platform. She joined the crowd piling on to the first westbound train.
Many years later, after both mother and daughter had been through half a lifetime of horrors, Martha told her daughter Lenina the story of her sister’s presumed death. But Martha mentioned the incident casually, pretending that it was perfectly normal. Something was broken inside her, or perhaps it had never been there.