Even as a small child, I feared my grandmother Martha. When she came to visit us in 1976 it was the first and only time she left the Soviet Union, and her first flight in an aeroplane. Before her trip to England, the longest journey she had made was as a Gulag prisoner in a train to Kazakhstan, and again on her way back. In the heavy suitcases she brought to London she had packed her own set of thick cotton bed sheets, as was the custom for Soviet travellers.
When Martha moved her limbs seemed impossibly cumbersome, as though her body were a burden to her. She wore the cheapest possible Soviet print dresses and heavy carpet slippers at home; when she went out she would put on a musty tweed twinset. She almost never smiled. At the family dinner table she would sit grim and impassive, as though disapproving of the bourgeois luxury in which her daughter lived. Once, when I pretended that my knife and fork were drumsticks, Martha scolded me with a sudden anger which made my eyes prick with tears. I wasn’t sorry when she left. She dissolved into passionate tears as she said goodbye, which embarrassed me. ‘I’ll never see you again,’ she said to my mother, and she was right. There was no time to say much more, as my father was waiting outside in his orange Volkswagen Beetle to take her to Heathrow.
I often think of Martha now, trying to strip away the layers of hearsay and adult knowledge which have grown around her image in my mind, to recall my own memories of her. I try to imagine the pretty, buxom girl that Boris Bibikov married. I wonder how she could have had a daughter as vivacious and full of positive energy as my own mother. After unravelling some of the story of Martha’s broken life, I see that some twist in her soul turned all her energy and life force in on itself. She hated the world, and having been deprived of happiness, she tried to destroy it in everyone around her. I was a small child when I knew her. But even then, I sensed in the deadness of her eyes, the woodenness of her embrace, something eerie, and damaged.
The train from Simferopol carried Martha weswards to Kurman Kimilchi. People told her there was work to be had there, so she descended on to the dusty platform and walked to the collective farm office. She was given a cot in a jerry-built barracks for itinerant summer labourers. There she met the young commissar Boris Bibikov.
Martha and Boris’s liaison was a revolutionary marriage. He was a fast-rising and educated member of the new revolutionary élite, she a simple farm girl with impeccable proletarian credentials. There may have been an element of calculation in Bibikov’s choice. Or, perhaps more likely, it was a shotgun wedding, the result of a summer fling consummated in the high grass of a Crimean meadow on a hot summer night.
Their first daughter was born seven months after they ‘signed’ – the new jargon for civil marriage – in March 1925. Bibikov named her Lenina after the Revolution’s recently deceased leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. When Lenina was eight months old her father entered the Red Army for his military service. Martha would show Lenina the letters Bibikov sent home, would point to them and say, ‘Daddy’.
When Bibikov returned home Lenina was two years old, and she cried as the strange man came into the house. Martha told her that her Daddy had come back. Little Lenina said no, that’s not Daddy, and pointed to the tin box where Martha kept her husband’s letters – that’s Daddy in there. It was as if she had a childish premonition of the day when Boris would walk out of the door and out of their lives – and turn back into a stack of papers.
Boris Bibikov’s life only really comes into focus in 1929, when Lenina’s clearest memories of him begin, and the project to which he dedicated his career and which was to propel him to a kind of greatness was launched. In April of that year the Sixteenth Communist Party Conference approved the first Five Year Plan for the Development of the People’s Economy. The Civil War was won, the Party’s General Secretary Iosif Stalin had ousted his arch-rival Lev Trotsky, and the Plan was the Party’s grand design for creating a socialist country out of the ruins of a Russia wrecked by war and revolution. It was not just an economic project – it was, to young believers like Bibikov, no less than the blueprint for a shining socialist future.
The key to the Plan was socializing the peasants, who made up over eighty per cent of the population and were considered by the Party to be dangerously reactionary. The Revolution was predominantly urban, educated, doctrinaire -like Bibikov himself. The peasants, with their blasphemous desire to own land, their strong attachment to family, clan and church, directly challenged the Party’s monopoly over their souls. The aim was to turn the countryside into a ‘grain factory’, and the peasants into workers.
‘A hundred thousand tractors will turn the muzhik, the peasant man, into a Communist,’ wrote Lenin. As many peasants as possible were to be driven into the cities, where they would become good proletarians. Those who remained on the land were to work on vast, efficient, collective farms. And what was needed in order to make those farms efficient and free up labour for the cities was tractors. During the spring planting of 1929 there were only five tractors in use in the whole of the Ukraine. The rest of the labour was carried out by men and horses. The vast black-earthed land still moved, as it had for numberless generations, to the slow heartbeat of the seasons and the rhythms of human and animal labour.
This, the Party would change. Stalin personally ordered two giant tractor factories built in the heart of the grain belt of south-central Russia – one in Kharkov, in the Ukraine, the empire’s bread basket, and another on the edge of the empty steppes of western Kazakhstan, in Chelyabinsk, The Party also coined a slogan: ‘We will produce first-class machines, in order to more thoroughly plough up the virgin soil of the peasant consciousness!’
The Kharkov Tractor Factory, or KhTZ, was to be built on scrubland outside the city, in a bare field. The scale of the project, its sheer ambition, was staggering. For the first year of construction the Party allocated 287 million gold rubles, 10,000 workers, 2,000 horses, 160,000 tons of iron and 100,000 tons of steel. Bricks were to be made of the clay dug out for the foundations. The only machines on the site when the ground was broken were twenty-four mechanical concrete mixers and four gravel-crushers.
The vast majority of the labour force was made up of untrained peasants who had just been dispossessed of their land. Most had never seen a machine other than a horsedrawn thresher. Bricklayers knew how to build a Russian stove but had no idea how to construct a brick building, carpenters knew how to build an izba, a log cabin, with an axe, but not a barrack.
It seems appropriate to speak of these days in a heroic tone because that was certainly how Bibikov viewed himself and his mission. That the project got started, let alone finished in record time, is a testament to the ruthless faith and fanatical energy of its builders. Unlike later generations of Soviet bureaucrats, the Party men of the KhTZ were not desk-bound pen-pushers. Even discounting the hyperbole of the official accounts, reports that they worked in the mud among the bewildered, sullen and half-starved peasants are well-documented. More, they turned them not just into workers but into believers themselves. And in the absence of proper equipment or skilled workers, it was little more than pure faith – and pure fear – that turned a clay field into ninety million bricks, and from those bricks built an industrial behemoth. The whole project was to be a demonstration of how the Party’s unshakeable will could triumph over impossible odds.