Yegor was neither the most talented nor the cleverest of his generation. But he was one of the most colourful and active. He encapsulated its traits and its defining features with a clarity that is not obscured by genius. He remained an active player in Russian political life longer than many others. As such he makes an ideal subject for the study of the generation that attempted to reform the Soviet Union but instead contributed to its demise.
How and why did this ‘ideologically sound’ journalist, a fervent member of the Communist Party, come to undermine the system? If the Soviet Union was a monolith totalitarian system, how did he manage to break through it? And what gave him and his circle the strength and determination to rise to the top? Some of the answers can be gleaned from their ‘anketa’ or official forms which had to be filled in with every move – a change of a job, a trip abroad, a promotion, a demotion. The first question was always about ‘fathers’.
Yegor’s first ‘autobiography’ is dated July 1949, when Yegor was about to go to the Historical Archival Institute. Blue, faint ink on aged, poor-quality yellow paper. ‘Father: Yakovlev Vladimir Ivanovich, participated in the revolutionary movement since 1911, a member of the Communist Party since 1 January, 1919. The first years after the revolution worked in Ch.K in Ukraine…’15
Ch.K (pronounced Cheka) was an abbreviation for the All Russian Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation. It was set up to stop looting, but quickly developed into a secret police force designed to prevent counter-revolutionary actions and execute ‘class enemies’. Yegor’s father was the head of Ch.K in Odessa, which was taken by the Bolsheviks in April 1919. Ivan Bunin, one of Russia’s finest writers and its first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an ardent anti-Bolshevik, who fled St Petersburg after the revolution, described Odessa in 1919 as ‘a dead and empty port; a dead burned-out city…’. The office of the Ch.K, where Yakovlev’s father served, was ‘decked with red flags which, extremely filthy and droopy from the rain, cast thin and bloody reflections on the wet asphalt’.16 ‘Day and night we live in an orgy of death. They keep talking in the name of some “bright future” and will supposedly issue forth from this satanic gloom. There have already appeared on this earth an entire legion of specialists and contractors who seek to fashion human well-being,’17 Bunin wrote.
Yet in his own imagination Yegor placed his father, whom he barely remembered, in a context created by Isaak Babel, an Odessa writer who embraced the revolution and painted colourful portraits of local gangsters ‘squeezed into crimson waistcoats, their steel shoulders enveloped in red-brown jackets’. Yegor believed it was his father who had nailed the most notorious bandit Mishka ‘the Jap’, who had served as a prototype for Babel’s Benya Krik – the ‘King’ of Odessa gangsters. Whether Yegor’s father actually caught Mishka ‘the Jap’ is unknown. What is known, though, is that according to Grigory Besedovsky, a former Soviet diplomat who defected to Paris in 1928, he was a ‘strange and sinister’ figure of extreme cruelty who, in three months as the head of the Ch.K, ordered the execution of 5,000 people – among them his own father, who was an active member of the ultra-nationalist, monarchist and anti-Semitic organization called the Union of Russian People. Yegor described his grandfather as a drunken and abusive man who occasionally threatened his wife – Yegor’s grandmother – with a knife. When he was detained for counter-revolutionary activities, Yegor’s father decided he should be dealt with according to the law of the revolution and so he sanctioned his own father’s execution. Afterwards, Yegor’s paternal grandmother apparently committed suicide in her son’s flat.
Was this inhuman? Perhaps. But so, Yegor argued, was the death of his father’s sister, who was beaten to death with metal rods by the Cossacks when they found revolutionary literature on her. The harshness of the revolutionary years was dictated not by cruelty but by ‘the purity of the revolution and its ideals’ and by ‘neterpenie [intolerance or impatience] – the most wonderful quality of a revolutionary’,18 Yegor concluded in a short book published in 1965.
The book was written in the form of an imaginary conversation with his father. Yegor called it Ia idu s toboi (I Am Walking Alongside You). It was preceded and probably inspired by a novel by Yuri Trifonov, one of the most prominent and talented post-Second World War Soviet writers, called Otblesk kostra (Fireglow) – a semi-documentary book about the life of his father, an Old Bolshevik who participated in the revolution and the civil war. People of Yegor Yakovlev’s generation and background lived in the glow of the fire that their fathers had started in order to burn the old Russia, which eventually consumed them too. Soviet history was their family history and they perceived it as such.
Yegor’s father died in 1935, two years before Stalin’s purges of his own elite reached their peak. Yegor was five years old. Though his father apparently died of cancer, there were rumours that he had been poisoned. ‘Within a few years most of Yegor’s father’s colleagues vanished. Yegor remembered a family friend coming to see his mother in 1937 and telling her stories of people being taken away in the middle of the night. Her response was placid and common: “When you chop down trees chips fly.”’19
‘Chopping trees’ was something that Yegor’s father himself oversaw. Metaphors in the Soviet Union had a physical dimension. In the late 1920s to early 1930s Yegor’s father was responsible for timber harvesting which was almost entirely carried out by the slave labour of the Gulag. When Yegor was born, his father was in Vologda and Archangel – overseeing the logging of trees by the inmates. Some of this Gulag timber was exported to England. British timber yards received logs which had markings and inscriptions made by the Gulag prisoners as it was the only way of communication with the outside world that was still available to them. ‘With suffering you get this timber’, read one such inscription.
Yegor’s father had travelled to England on business, which probably included the export of that timber. That is where Yegor’s parents actually met. In 1929 – the year of Stalin’s ‘Great Break’ – his mother, who had worked at the Soviet Trade Representation, moved back to the Soviet Union pregnant with Yegor. As Yegor’s father was a senior member of the Soviet nomenclatura, the family was given an old merchant’s house in a quiet part of Moscow across the river from the Kremlin. Yegor’s mother chose it in preference to a flat on the embankment, in a luxury apartment block where many of the Bolshevik elite lived – and where most of them would be arrested (Trifonov wrote a novel about this place called The House on the Embankment). Such was the scale of the purges that nobody living in the Moscow of the 1930s could claim ignorance. The show trials of the enemies of the people were public; the stories of those who returned from the labour camps were plentiful. But seeing the arrests, or hearing about them, was not the same as comprehending them as evil. That required a remarkable independence of thought and few people possessed it. Yegor was not one of them. He grew up with the cult of his father in his head and a portrait of Stalin on the wall – just like any nomenclatura family.
When, in 1949, Yegor’s school friend cursed Stalin and accused those who worshipped him of hypocrisy, Yegor kicked him out of the house. ‘I never heard anyone talk about Him [Stalin] like this. He called hypocrites those who spoke of their love for Stalin, he chose the worst epithets for him. It was unbelievable. But he spoke calmly and firmly – just like he talked about astronomy in school. First, I argued with him. Then I said: “Go away! Go away! You are a bastard.” He was walking down the stairs and I was shouting something offensive at his back.’20